Podcast appearances and mentions of Richard Saul Wurman

Chris Anderson, head of TED, discusses why the collapse of the ideals of the tech industry over the last 15 years, embodied by the behaviour Elon Musk, represents a crushing disappointment.  Anderson took over TED – which hosts viral talks at its conferences – from its founder Richard Saul Wurman in 2000. He turned the business into a non-profit and has spent years curating its eclectic list of speakers. Anderson discusses why developments in AI technology are terrifying and the future of TED as he plans to step back.

My guest today is Mark J. Carter, a passionate advocate for mastermind groups and mentoring programs. Mark shares his 20-year journey of running mastermind groups both offline and online, and his experience from interviewing successful people for his book Idea Climbing. Join us as we dive into the use of podcasting as a powerful networking tool and the importance of maintaining authenticity in relationships. Mark discusses his approach to podcasting, the pitfalls of using it purely for prospecting, and his new venture into helping B2B entrepreneurs through interviews and online classes. We also touch upon the significance of building genuine connections and avoiding bait-and-switch tactics.GUEST RESOURCESMark J. Carter has always been curious about how successful people got where they are in life. He has been interviewing successful people for 24 years, posting interviews online for 11 of those years. Mark's other projects include events and marketing initiatives. He has collaborated with TED's founder Richard Saul Wurman to create a world-class conference and helped with branding for the world's largest chapter of Meeting Professionals International (MPI). Mark has launched book tours and events for New York Times best-selling business authors, helping them share their big ideas with the world. Mark still enjoys interviewing people and posts many of the interviews on his YouTube station and his Idea Climbing podcast and Idea Climbing internet radio show.  Mark's interviews culminated in his recent book, Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea.   www.MarkJCarter.comwww.markjcartertv.com www.facebook.com/mjcarterwww.linkedin.com/in/mjcartertwitter.com/mjcarterwww.youtube.com/@markjcarter www.IdeaClimbingBook.com  Connect as a Human First: A simplified path to creating compelling content BE IN CHARGE >> TAKE ACTION >> GET RESULTSConquer Your BusinessJoin us on FacebookLinkedInInstagram

Just because we live in the age of information doesn't mean that we're actually learning. As a society, we're overwhelmed, and there's a reason for it — the explosion of non-information. This candid episode reveals more about it. Today, we're diving into the mind of Richard Saul Wurman, an American architect, designer, and visionary creator behind the TED Conference. He is a prolific thinker and content creator, having written, designed, and published 90 books, among a plethora of other accomplishments. Considered the father of information architecture, he shares his unique approach to understanding complex subjects and why he believes in embracing our “stupidity” as a way to innovate and remain curious and open to new ideas.  Wurman also delivers a relevant criticism of the current state of education that relies on memorization and how AI is disrupting that. On the same note, he elaborates on the concepts behind his books “Information Anxiety” and “UnderstandingUnderstanding,” delivering a unique POV on how the currently overwhelming amount of non-information clouds our minds.  Beyond AI, we also dig into how the TED conference was born and Wurman's philosophy of work. These unconventional perspectives on innovation, learning, and communication offer listeners a fresh viewpoint on how to navigate the complexities of the modern world. Tune in for a dose of unconventional wisdom. — Key Takeaways: Introduction (00:00) Richard's Take On Simplifying, Curiosity, and Embracing Ignorance (01:11) Discussing AI's Impact on Information Anxiety (11:24) Facing Failure by Doing Good Work (16:40) Understanding, Understanding / Explaining, Explaining (22:02) Richard on His Experience With the TED Conference (27:58) Speed Round Questions (36:42) — ADDITIONAL RESOURCES Learn more about Richard Saul Wurman: https://www.wurman.com Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/44ieyPB Follow our podcast: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/44kONi6 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3NtVK9W Join the TDW tribe and learn more: https://disruptedwork.com

To celebrate TED's 40th anniversary, Head of TED Chris Anderson and TED's founder Richard Saul Wurman reflect on the conference's transformative journey — from its inception as a daring experiment blending technology, entertainment and design to its expansion into a global platform for world-changing ideas. Get a glimpse into the minds behind a movement that has sparked innovation, redefined the art of storytelling and fostered community worldwide in a conversation brimming with unheard anecdotes, wisdom and the spirit of curiosity. (Visit ted.com/membership to join TED today and access more exclusive events like this one.)

To celebrate TED's 40th anniversary, Head of TED Chris Anderson and TED's founder Richard Saul Wurman reflect on the conference's transformative journey — from its inception as a daring experiment blending technology, entertainment and design to its expansion into a global platform for world-changing ideas. Get a glimpse into the minds behind a movement that has sparked innovation, redefined the art of storytelling and fostered community worldwide in a conversation brimming with unheard anecdotes, wisdom and the spirit of curiosity. (Visit ted.com/membership to join TED today and access more exclusive events like this one.)

To celebrate TED's 40th anniversary, Head of TED Chris Anderson and TED's founder Richard Saul Wurman reflect on the conference's transformative journey — from its inception as a daring experiment blending technology, entertainment and design to its expansion into a global platform for world-changing ideas. Get a glimpse into the minds behind a movement that has sparked innovation, redefined the art of storytelling and fostered community worldwide in a conversation brimming with unheard anecdotes, wisdom and the spirit of curiosity. (Visit ted.com/membership to join TED today and access more exclusive events like this one.)

Richard Saul Wurman is many things. The creator of the TED conference has also authored scores of books, ranging from revolutionary city guides to a collection of a collection of words by Louis Kahn. Robb and Josh welcomed Richard for a conversation about the LATCH system he devised for organizing information. This early Invisible Machines recording goes to unexpected places as a legendary architect and designer shares his unfiltered thinking on myriad topics.

Richard Saul Wurman, the Creator of TED and other top conferences, Author of 90 books, Architect, and Artist, joins the show to share his journey from taking a triple course load at Penn to exploring challenging questions at age 88. Hear why he wishes he was a brain in a jar, his thoughts on being mentally sharp at his age, how to get better at listening and acronyms, how to decide what project to pursue next, and the most interesting documentary he's ever watched. Connect with Richard at Wurman.com

¿Cómo crear una presentación tipo TED?Muchas personas interesadas en comunicar sus ideas y fortalecer su marca personal se preguntan ¿Cómo crear una presentación tipo TED? En este episodio, Mauricio Salazar, Director de TED x Bogotá nos estrega algunas pistas.Antes de ¿Cómo crear una presentación tipo TED?, la historia…Las charlas TED, ahora ampliamente disponibles en línea, tuvieron un comienzo que difiere significativamente de su actual alcance. En 2006, tan solo un año después del debut de YouTube, el vicepresidente Al Gore presentó una charla TED sobre el cambio climático. Aunque su pasión por el tema no sorprendió, lo que realmente captó la atención fue el formato de video en línea, entonces relativamente nuevo. Este evento, que antes solo estaba al alcance de unos pocos invitados, había tomado una nueva forma global, brindando acceso a científicos, pensadores, ingenieros, diseñadores y artistas de renombre mundial.Los Inicios de las Charlas TED.Aunque ahora las charlas TED están disponibles fácilmente en línea, no siempre fue así. El arquitecto y diseñador estadounidense Richard Saul Wurman tenía la visión de crear una plataforma para el intercambio de ideas en la intersección de la tecnología, el entretenimiento y el diseño. De ahí nace el acrónimo TED.El primer evento TED en 1984, en Monterrey, California, presentó a figuras influyentes de la industria, como Nicholas Negroponte, fundador del Media Lab del MIT,. Ese primer encuentro exploró futuras posibilidades, incluyendo las capacidades de la tecnología de pantalla táctil. Sony también reveló su recién nacido CD. En ese entonces, "la música digital" era un concepto nuevo y emocionante. Este evento, cofundado por Wurman y el diseñador gráfico Harry Marks, sufrió pérdidas financieras y fue suspendido hasta 1990. A partir de entonces, la conferencia TED se convirtió en un evento anual en Monterrey, abriendo su lista de oradores no solo a científicos, ingenieros y diseñadores, sino también a músicos, líderes empresariales y filántropos.El Cambio de RumboEn el año 2000, Chris Anderson, empresario de medios de la Fundación Sapling, sin fines de lucro, adquirió TED, pasando la propiedad a la Fundación TED en 2019. Como curador, Anderson mantuvo la misión original de TED: el intercambio de ideas. Bajo su liderazgo, TED comenzó a compartir charlas selectas en línea, consolidando su presencia y aumentando su reconocimiento con las famosas TED Talks.En 2017, Elon Musk discutió sus motivaciones para colonizar Marte, mientras que Ellen Jorgensen exploró la edición genética CRISPR y sus implicaciones para nuestro futuro en 2016.La Promesa de TEDUna de las características más atractivas de las charlas TED es que se mantienen relevantes a lo largo del tiempo, como las reflexiones de Al Gore sobre el cambio climático.Desde su inicio en 1984 hasta su estado actual, las charlas TED han demostrado ser un vehículo para la innovación y la inspiración, conectando a personas de todo el mundo y trascendiendo fronteras. En una época de desafíos globales, el legado de TED sigue prometiendo soluciones y perspectivas que nos guiarán hacia un futuro más brillante.Nuestro invitado Mauricio Salazar nos contará ¿Cómo crear una presentación tipo TED?Mauricio Salazar trabaja en la búsqueda y co-creación de soluciones que impacten positivamente el futuro de las personas, organizaciones y/o la sociedad, impulsando el cambio de mentalidad, generando nuevas narrativas y visibilizando o empoderando ideas en acción.Es el organizador y curador principal de TEDxBogotá, organización dedicada a identificar y promover ideas de colombianos dignas de ser compartidas. (en el 2019 fue el TEDx más grande del mundo con más de 10mil asistentes al movistar arena y 173mil personas conectadas por tv nacional e internet definiendo el concepto de Resiliencia)Es el Director general de Social-Colectivo laboratorio de co-creación de futuros posibles y la fundación que lleva el mismo nombre, la cual tiene la misión conectar y acelerar el acceso al conocimiento que brinde bienestar y calidad de vida a la humanidad.Hoy tiene 3 obsesiones: Encontrar los caminos que den acceso a mejorar nuestra Salud Mental, el desarrollo de las habilidades necesarias para la vida y como cambiar el cambio climático.Su frase favorita es "el conocimiento nos hace libres, pero solo las conexiones nos dan el poder para actuar."Cómo Crear Una Presentación Tipo TED, TED Talks, Charlas TED, TED x, TEDD x Bogotá, Mauricio Salazar, Hablar En Público, podcast, Podcast Corporativo, Comunicación Organizacional, Recursos Humanos, Desarrollo Profesional, Desarrollo Personal, Comunicación Efectiva, Santiago Ríos, Mil Palabras

What's the best way to organize the content in our experiences? What tricks are we forgetting to try? And what if you learned there were five ways to do it — and only five? Host Jonathan Alger (C&G Partners) does a solo show on “L.A.T.C.H.”, the framework proposed by TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, where there are just five ways to organize any kind of information. Along the way, we'll cover dozens of ways to apply L.A.T.C.H. to museum and experience projects, explore two surprising potential additions to the list, and even do a little audience participation. Quotable Quotes:“Wurman's idea was that any form of information organization was one of these five, or a subtype of one of them — and there aren't any others.” “You could organize a sculpture show by C for Categorical, by sorting by medium. You could put marble over here, bronze over there … and dead shark in formaldehyde way over there.” “Each of the five types don't only have examples like the ones we talked about. They also have subtypes. Let's look into some.” “Sometimes you have an idea but it doesn't feel quite right. Maybe it's because the L.A.T.C.H. types aren't the right fit. Or you are combining subtypes in an awkward way. But you didn't know why. And maybe now you know.”“There are two proposed additions to the list. One totally surprised me. The other has me scratching my head. Let's see what you think.” How to Listen:Subscribe and listen anywhere you get your podcasts. Or start here: https://makingthemuseum.transistor.fm/9 See you there! Warmly,Jonathan - - - - - - - - - - - - -  Bio:We always start with a guest bio, but this is a solo show, so here's mine: I am the Managing Partner of C&G Partners, a design firm in New York City working with cultural clients. I was taught architecture and graphic design in the day, and theater and music at night, but never thought I could do all that for a living. Like every guest on this show so far, I got into this field accidentally. In fact it found me, but that's a story for another time. About:Making the Museum is hosted (podcast) and written (newsletter) by Jonathan Alger. This is a project of C&G Partners | Design for Culture. Learn about the firm's creative work at: https://www.cgpartnersllc.comShow Links:Richard Saul Wurman's “Information Anxiety”:https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2019/03/book-review-information-anxiety.php Nathan Shedroff's Additions:https://nathan.com/information-interaction-design-a-unified-field-theory-of-design/ Contacting Jonathan:https://www.makingthemuseum.com/contacthttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanalgerhttps://www.cgpartnersllc.comalger@cgpartnersllc.com - - - - - - - - - - - - - Newsletter:Like the episode? Subscribe to the newsletter! Making the Museum is also a very short daily newsletter on exhibition planning for museum leaders, exhibition teams and visitor experience professionals. Learn more, read past editions, and subscribe here: https://www.makingthemuseum.com - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Richard Saul Wurman is an American architect and graphic designer. Wurman has written, designed, and published 90 books and created the TED conferences, the EG Conference, TEDMED, and the WWW Conference.

In this episode, we explore how the five organizational methods of LATCH (Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy) provide order, generate discussion, and inspire creativity.We also note how combining or overlaying multiple types of information organization can create hilarious results (hierarchical vampire caskets, reverse alphabetized stadium seating).Why this matters:Whether you think about it or not, the way you choose to organize information directly affects how others experience it, be it your next combat encounter or your record collection. As dungeon masters, we often default to a mix of location and category (such as “in dungeon room L1 the party encounters 5 Giant Spiders”). What would happen to our campaigns if we switched up the way we organize?When you are intentional with the way you structure your games, it allows you to be more intentional with the experience you're creating for your players.

Many in the UX world are familiar with the likes of Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen, Peter Morville, Lou Rosenfeld, and Richard Saul Wurman, but are you familiar with others who helped pave the way for the discipline? For the 100th episode of The World of UX, Darren takes time to pay homage to several pioneers of the discipline, especially many who have been tremendously impactful, but overlooked by the masses. Tune in to hear who's on Darren's list of special UX pioneers."#ux#eq#podcasts#cxofmradio#cxofm#realuxtalk#worldofux#uxhomageCheck out the new World of UX website at https://www.worldoux.com.Visit the UX Uncensored blog at https://uxuncensored.medium.com. 

How do you understand and organize information in a way that makes it memorable and accessible? The goal here at Kwik Brain isn't simply to get you reading, remembering, and learning faster. It's to help you increase your productivity by understanding what you're learning. But what does it mean to understand something? And how do you know whether you truly understand it or not? In today's episode, I'm going to go deeper into this topic by reading from Richard Saul Wurman's new book, Understanding Understanding. Richard has written over 90 books on everything from information to architecture, but he's most well-known for creating the TED conference, so he knows a lot about ideas, understanding, and how to share them. Listen in as I read an excerpt that's going to set up the framework for what it means to understand something. From there, I'm going to give you five tips on how to organize information for better focus, retention, and understanding. *** If you're inspired, I want to invite you to join me in my brand NEW 7-day course, specifically designed to boost your confidence. I know it sounds too good to be true, but I give you step-by-step guides using the accelerated learning model to make you unstoppable in a short time. Visit kwikconfidence.com to join me today. *** Or text me 310-299-9362 to get your burning questions answered and an insider sneak peek of exciting updates. I do my best to answer as many as I can each day, so shoot me a message today.

Richard Saul Wurman is one of the most influential American architects and graphic designers of our time. He created the TED Conference, most popularly known as the TedTalks series. Early in his career, he coined the term “Information Architecture”, which defined a new era and addressed design solution for communicating rising amounts of data. Richard is driven by a singular passion in his life: making information understandable for both himself and others.  In this interview, he discusses being in the business of what he calls "the next idea" where his greatest value and expertise is his ignorance. His latest venture includes establishing “The Wurman Center for Understanding Understanding” at the Rochester Institute of Technology.   For Richard, learning is the process of remembering what you are interested in. Throughout our conversation, you may yourself listening with a smile. That's because of Richard's wit, brutal honesty, and crystal-clear analysis of complex issues.  

Making information understandable both for himself and others—TED founder and author of over 90 books, Richard Saul Wurman, joins to talk about education.

Dan Klyn is co-founder of The Understanding Group, an information architecture consultancy based in Michigan. Dan has also created useful and influential IA frameworks, and in this conversation, we focus on his latest: the BASIC framework. If you're enjoying the show, please rate or review it in Apple's Podcasts directory: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-informed-life/id1450117117?itsct=podcast_box&itscg=30200 Show notes Dan Klyn The Understanding Group The BASIC framework Chris Farnum Peter Morville Louis Rosenfeld Andreas Resmini Richard Saul Wurman Bob Royce Edith Farnsworth House Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Kimbell Art Museum Louis Kahn Renzo Piano Brian Eno Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Dan, welcome to the show. Dan: Thank you. Jorge: It is such a pleasure to have you here. As I was telling you before we started recording, you're one of the people that I originally thought of having as a guest on the show, when I first conceived of the show. I am constantly inspired and just amazed by the contributions you've brought to our field of information architecture. And I'm honored to have you on the show and looking forward to hearing about you. In particular, about a framework that you've been sharing recently. About Dan Jorge: But before we get into that, I'm hoping that you will tell us about yourself. Who are you, Dan? Dan: Sure. Let's see... I was a fat baby. I think the reason that I have the pleasure of talking with you today... we can blame Chris Farnham, who is an information architect in Southeast Michigan. I went to a conference about information architecture in 2009. My first professional conference had ever been to in any field, and I didn't know if I was particularly welcome or fit well into the field of information architecture, but I had a mentor who encouraged me and that was Peter Morville. So Chris Farnham and Peter Morville, these two guys from Ann Arbor are the only people I thought I knew at this conference, which was true for about five minutes. And as we were walking to the opening reception, Chris said, "Hey, those two guys walking in front of us... those guys are architect-architects. Like, you know, like what you're interested in, Klyn!" Because even back then, the architecture part of information architecture is what I was mostly interested in. And walking in front of me on the way to this opening reception at the IA Summit, as it was called back then was Jorge Arango and Andreas Resmini. And I never talked to Chris again for four or five years, I think. And I have held fast to Jorge and Andreas ever since. And I'm so grateful to have had... I've been given by you guys permission to be as excited as I am about the architecture part of information architecture. Which is so different than my experience with other professionals in the built environment. When I started enthusing about information architecture and the ways that I think what makes places good for people in the built environment has something immediately relevant for us to learn from, as people who make digital products and services.... they're not into it. They scold me for not having consulted the correct sources. Or having the wrong opinions about some buildings or what have you. And you and Andreas both welcomed my amateurism, at a time when you could have just, you know... I don't know! So that's why I'm here. Hi, my name is Dan Klyn. I'm an information architect and I am fascinated by — I am on fire about — the ways that architecture in the built environment can teach us how to do things with digital products and services. And any second now, metaverse-icle products and services and such. So that's what I'm interested. I'm interested in the spatiality of meaning. That is a mouthful that nobody wants to hear, but that's how I say it sometimes. And I have drawn most of my ways of thinking about and seeing this from an increasingly intensive pursuit of Richard Saul Wurman from a biographical standpoint. I figured if I could learn everything that he knows about information architecture, then that would be pretty good. So I've been trying to turn him upside down and shake him, and catch what comes out of his pockets for about seven years or so now. So, that's what I do. Jorge: That's a great intro and I feel like this episode is turning into the Jorge and Dan mutual appreciation society. But I think that we can't wrap up the intro without also naming the fact that you are a co-founder of The Understanding Group, Dan: right? The Understanding Group Dan: That's right. Yes! And Mr. Wurman having been so essential to the founding of our company. Bob Royce and I, when he... he as a serial entrepreneur was in the school of information and library studies at the same time that Peter and Lou were back in the day. And so, as somebody from a business development background standpoint, interested in information architecture, his interest in it went all the way back to Richard Saul Wurman. And the first time I saw Richard in person was a speech that he gave at the University of Michigan and the only person that I knew in the audience and we sat right next to each other right in the front row is Bob Royce. So yeah, together, our enthusiasm for information architecture, digital strategy... whatever ways that we can apply architectural thinking to usually large-scale software and information systems, that's what we wanted to start a company to focus on. And certainly we were inspired by and got to learn through their advice. Peter and Lou having operated the world's first really large scale information architecture consultancy, which was called Argus, which operated back in the late 1990s and disbanded, about the same time that a lot of things did in March of 2001. Yeah, there's probably a way that you could have a business that focuses on information architecture and that... we want it to be that. So, that was 10 years ago and TUG continues to be among the... if you were to say, "Hey, who should we get to help us with information architecture?" people would probably say, Jorge Arango, Abby Covert. An aspiration that we're just pleased that we are often in that same sort of three or four things that you would just know about when it comes to taking on significant information architectural challenges in software and digital products and services, yeah! That's what we've become. "The spatiality of meaning" Jorge: I want to circle back to this phrase, "the spatiality of meaning." And you referenced being inspired by Mr. Wurman. And you also talked about "Being on fire about the architecture of the built environment," and talking about gravitating to Andreas and myself at that first information architecture summit. And one thing that the three of us have in common, the three of us being Mr. Wurman, Andreas, and myself, is that our background is in building architecture. But that is not your background, right? Dan: Correct. Library science over here. Jorge: Library science. So, I'm wondering what drew you to the architecture of the built environment? Dan: It's gonna sound... it's exactly... think of the most boring cliche way to answer your question and that's the answer. Since I was a little boy, I had a Crayola drafting set of a T-square and a triangle. And big paper. And my parents got me a tilty desk. Like it was the only thing I knew that I wanted it to be until I didn't think that I could because I was bad at math. So, for as long as I can remember, I wanted to make the shapes that I make on paper turn into an experience that people could have. Especially me, but other people may be also. And since then, and especially since becoming a consultant who travels a lot, I have had an extraordinary opportunity to go to buildings. And I have had my cognition, my heart rate, my pulse, my skin temperature... I have been physically changed by every different kind of place that I've been to. And by doing that on purpose, that's where the BASIC Framework comes from is an awareness that I developed at some point that what these buildings do is they are machines that uniquely change our human experience by changing our blood pressure and our cognition and our pulse. And the effects that it uses are both, you know, the physics of the earth, the density of the walls... if you're in a crypt of a cathedral and the density of the walls is two feet thick and it is granite, the air pressure changes in there make what your body can... what's possible for you to experience has been concrete-ized literally in ways that are just extraordinary. And so, by putting myself in so many of these different places, and yes, I've catered to my list of initially is canonical buildings that architects who control what is considered to be a good building in the Western tradition, right? But that's the kind of list that I started from. And by going to as many of these places as possible, continually re-energizing and re-believing in reifying the reality... not some neat-o idea that I choose to have, but an actual experience that is undeniable that the way that these places have been set up through the arrangement of material and space and through the arrangement of the information that is either encoded in that material or inscribed on that material, the situatedness of things in space changes how we... how we experience things. The radical architect, Christopher Alexander — people scoff! Like, spit their coffee out when he says stuff like that he knows how to make God appear in a field. But that's... I think also a part of why I've been so interested in this is having been raised in a deeply religious context and hearing about power that people can have access to and experiences with and transformation, transfiguration, transubstantiation, immanence... that I've had those experiences. And they're not so much with sermons of words — it's sermons in stone that really changed my whole life. So, now I seek out experiences in places so that I can understand better how to somehow transfer or remember at a minimum, all of the different ways that I've been made to feel through experiences with architectures. And then, how can I tap into that at some other time for some other purpose. That's how I've been trying to rationalize such the luxurious experience of going to so many kick-ass buildings. Jorge: Well, that was beautifully put and I'll reflect it back to you. What I heard there is that this phrase, "the spatiality of meaning," at least part of it, has to do with the fact that buildings play a functional role in our lives, right? Like they keep us dry and warm — you know, safe from external conditions. But there's this other role that they can play — at least some buildings can play — which has to do with somehow moving us, reminding us of perhaps higher states of being somehow. And the question is... you and I both work on architecting experiences that people have mostly within the confines of the small glass rectangles that we carry around in our pockets. And what's the connection between these — if any — between these transcendent experiences that you have when walking into a special place and the sort of experience that you can have through a digital artifact? Back to screens Dan: Well, I'm trying to think about it in terms of the last thing that I worked on or some real case in point. And I'm thinking about an app that I've been working on that has all kinds of different functionality. And there are ideas about what does prominence mean? So, imagine that this app that has all sorts of different kinds of functions, that there's a giant global organization, and there are people who are mapped to those functions and that they all feel like their thing needs to be the most important and therefore the most prominent or vice versa. So, there's a space race, or there's a competition for the most opportune positions on screens in this screen-iverse that they operate. And finding an order that both works from the, "I'm a brain in a jar," and there are semantic categories and there are things... there's knowledge in the world, not just in my head. And on the basis of knowledge in the world and on figuring things out from a sense-making standpoint, there's no right way. But there are good ways. And so what I'm trying to learn from the built environment, every location in the built environment is special. So, it's not so much that I've been to special places and then, "oh crap. What do you do when you're working on something quotidian? Something that's just every day." It's the idea that every place is charged with wonder. Every... everything is amazing. Because look at it! There it is! People made that! And so, trying to help this organization, this global organization with all these poor people who are, you know, if their thing is high up on the screen, then they win. Trying to posit order for how to situate all of those things in space that's both good for the organization that they can continue to operate as an organization and as a business. It's good for people who have to use it because it isn't like, "oh! Where is the blank?" And also then the trifecta is: and could all of this be key to our embodiment as human beings? And so, we came up with a way to position proprioceptively. Imagine yourself looking at your phone screen. There's left, right, up, down. To make left and right and up and down mean something, other than "most important," "least important," or "most prominent" and "least prominent." So, things of this nature you can expect to find them over to the left. Things of that other nature you can expect to find those to the right. And governance... a way of working with the organization to help diffuse the person with the highest tolerance for discomfort wins, for there to be reasons for belonging and space and place that everybody can understand, and that, when people follow it, it creates more wellbeing and prosperity. It sounds like fantasy, but that's really what we get to do when we're doing it right. And it's great! And I couldn't do it if I didn't have these experiences in my own body and have felt and believed in the pleasure and the learnability and the... to reliably be able to reach over here and get something because you know it's going to be there. And on what basis, other than, "well, that's where it always was." Jorge: What I'm getting from what you're saying there is that in both cases, in both the physical environment than these information environments, there is the possibility of a higher level of order that might bring coherence to what might otherwise be forces that are pulling the experience into different directions, that make it incoherent, right? Dan: That's right. The BASIC framework Jorge: And with that in mind I wanted to ask you... during your career, you've shared a few frameworks that have been influential and helped us see the type of work that we do in different ways. And recently you've shared a draft of a framework that is new to me at least, called BASIC. And it seems to me to be an effort in this direction of providing kind of a framework for order and coherence. Dan: Yes. Jorge: And I was hoping that you would tell us about the BASIC framework. What is it? Dan: I am learning along with everybody else what it is. That's one of the risks! When you put something out there that isn't done yet, that's the reason to do something like that. And so, having put it out there not entirely baked, and then asking for and eliciting feedback... one of the first most powerful pieces of feedback that I got after presenting it for the first time at a meetup online was from a colleague in the UK who posited that what BASIC is, is it's about where you as the designer... it gives you five vantage points into the problem space. It's like, "where should I stand to see the thing that would be good to notice?" So, that's one way to start explaining it is: it's an easy-to-remember acronym that gives you five ways to have a posture vis-a-vis some kind of a complex system. And if you stand in these five places, and if you ask some of the questions that I've provided with each of those postures, then possibly you will see the architecture of the thing. So, that's really the goal. And one of the ways that I came to make it, was a friend of mine... we went on a field trip. We went to the Edith Farnsworth house in Plano, Illinois by Mies van der Rohe. And we were so lucky! It was in the winter and we were the only ones on the tour. So we had a whole hour with the docent. Couldn't go in because it was winter, have since of rectified that. Have been back with the same friend and we got to go inside. But first time we're just outdoors, in the snow, circling the Edith Farnsworth house. And then afterward, I shared the photos that I took. And my friend noted that... he looked at the photos that he... we went to the same place, we took many of the same pictures. But that there was something going on in the pictures that I was taking that he wanted to know about, because it seemed like I was accessing different parts of the same experience. And whether it was just purely on the basis of the otherness of the what... something that somebody else is doing it in the same place, you wonder what that is? It's not... I don't believe it's because I have superior aesthetic judgements or anything like that. I think it has to do though with having developed a set of postures for when I'm trying to relate to buildings first of all, in order to see the right stuff. By my own internal compass, the right stuff. And then, talking this out with my friend and then him encouraging me to do something with it because it seemed like it could be learnable. Like, if I stood there and if I cocked my head that way, I would see it too. So, that's what it is. It's postures that you can use. Questions... So, the first one is boundaries. And if you didn't do any of the other elements, if you found a way to perceive the boundaries... and where was the boundary before where it is now, and who gets to move the... just some really dumb questions about boundaries and where one material stops and another begins is an especially potent thing to notice in buildings. But whether it's buildings or an intranet, the boundaries. How did they get here? Where were they before? Is there a plan to make there be different boundaries? Do you see any evidence of, you know, the ghost traces of where things used to be, or where they're fixing to go? And then you can go right on down the line. And the second one, let's see, what is the second one? You've got the book there, you tell me! Jorge: There is a little booklet that you can print out and I'm holding one in my hands. So, the first one is boundaries. The second one is associations. Dan: Yes. Perfect! So, what do we associate a stepped gable with in the built environment? I'm Dutch. If you go to Holland, Michigan, nearby where I live, there are these buildings that were built within the last 20 years that have these stepped gables not because they serve any functional purpose, but because they remind everybody who lives there, that many of the people here have Dutch heritage, and that that's how the buildings look. So there are direct associations like that. There are more diffused associations, like the kind... does it link to a PDF? You associate that differently than if it's to HTML page, then if it's a video. So just associations. The A, S... Situatedness. Why is anything where it is? If you go to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas — which I encourage you to do — there has been an expansion to that museum. It was originally by Louis Kahn opened in 1972, the year I was born. An expansion to the museum was done by Renzo Piano in the nineties. You now enter the Kimbell from the back, relative to where the architect imagined you would enter the building. So just little... why is anything where it is gives you access to so many architectural decisions that were made in the environment. And then the last two are twinned. And probably I'm too in love with BASIC because it's so easy to remember and I want it to be basic like food-hole, air-hole, dumb-basic. But the last two are invariants. So, what are the forces in the environment that don't change or that seem like they don't change? Brian Eno has wisely said that repetition is a form of change. So you have to be careful with this one. And that's why it is paired with cycles. And those two postures, those two places to stand relative to some complex system... if you were able to perceive what was invariant in the environment, that would explain to you why it shows up the way that it does and each of these elements in the model has a building that I've been to. They're all in the United States so far, and the example cartoon of a building for invariance is a garage I saw in Seattle. Where I live in Michigan, the roofs are a pointy, peaked roof, like kids around here would draw a picture of a house. But in Seattle, there's a shape of a roof that is inverted to catch the rain because it is on a steep hill, in a microclimate that is a rainforest basically. So, it's an invariant. There's so much water there, you're going to change the shape of the roof to rise to channel those forces better. And that was the consequence... consequence to that, a million other decisions about the building. And then cycle, the last one, you can plug that one into what's invariant. In Michigan, we have four seasons. In Seattle, they have maybe two. And so, by looking at what has the system done to anticipate cyclical change in the environment that it's in... put all those five postures together, ask a question from each one, and I feel pretty good that you're not talking about the design so much as you're talking about the architecture of the system. Jorge: What attracts me so much about this framework is that it takes a systemic lens at examining the... or a set of lenses, right? To your point, these are different vantage points from which you can examine the system. And although it is grounded in architecture, as in built architecture — and like you said, the booklet includes drawings of buildings as illustrations of these various lenses — they seem applicable to other types of things that might be architected, right? Like this notion that you can examine the system through the perspective of what distinctions does it manifest, versus what perhaps memories, cultural or otherwise, it triggers, right? Like those are very different perspectives that are part of architected systems, regardless of whether they are buildings or what have you. Dan: That's right. And the caveat here with any methods that I've developed, if you're trying to apply them, it has to be in an architectural context where the nature of the change that is expected or at least possible? Is more than an increment. It can be executed incrementally but the nature of the change... if you're looking for recommendations about how to change the architecture, it should be safe to presume that those kinds of changes are harder to do, possibly take more time, and are more costly because they are more consequential. And so, if people are just making shit, then this framework won't help you because there isn't a reason for everything that was done. And that is... I'm so glad that we've got to here and maybe because of time, we might land here or start landing here, is: the built environment is such a terrific teacher because almost always, except now, every decision that was made is because of a reason. And the traceability of every move that is made to a reason, you need to do that in design too, if you're doing it right. But when you're talking about architecture what that means is that it's being taken on and thought of systemically. And if the thing is being made in a way where it doesn't care about being systemic, then these lenses won't help you because it just is the way that it is because it is. This all presumes total accountability for every move that you make as a recommender of changes to an environment. And I've recommended changes to a digital environment that have made it so that people's jobs went away. I'm glad that I haven't worked on products and services where the changes I've recommended have caused harm to people, that I know of, but it's certainly possible. And as we enter into this metaverse time of everything being part of the experiences that we work on, I think having a framework like this is also helpful because it might check an impulsive feeling of, "oh, I get it." Or, "I've seen it." Or, "I know what it is." Or, "clearly the solution is..." Maybe this framework would help you go slower and not move with so much certainty. Maybe these are five ways to undermine the decision that you were about to make. And I would be good with that, in most cases. Jorge: How do you keep that from paralyzing you altogether? Because when you say you have full accountability over a thing, like... Dan: It all depends on having extraordinary clients. Without clients who are willing to work in that fashion... I mean, whether you want to take maximum accountability for your recommendations or not, Jorge: I can see what you mean, but I can also understand how that sense would or could paralyze you as a designer, right? So, how do you keep the dance going? Responsibility Dan: It's a two way street and if the client isn't playing along and giving you that accountability and that responsibility, then you're not actually... you know, it's not actually happening. So, I think it absolutely depends on having the right clients and TUG has been so fortunate to have not prospered enough to have clients that aren't the right kind. It's weird to engage with information architects to affect change to complex digital products and services. And I think we show up... weird enough, where we've scared away the ones who wouldn't be a good partner with us in wanting to have that level of accountability, that level of traceability for the recommendations that we make. Because it requires that the stakeholders be super accountable to what they want, because you're going to get it, right? Like, that's what I'm saying is, as your architect, if you show me your intent, if you let me make a model of your intent and then the model is more or less correct, then I can make a whole bunch of decisions about the situatedness of things in your space that will deliver against that intent. So God help you if you don't know what you want. Because I need that in order to make decisions on your... with you, not on your behalf. When we started TUG a long time ago, we decided the word agency must not be the word for... We don't want to borrow anyone's agency for money for a couple of months and then give it back to them. They need to keep their agency all along the way to keep instructing us and intending back when we make our moves to make sure that things stay good. So, yeah, it's all about having the right clients and quite frankly, it has a lot to do with my own personal choices over the last year or so to get away from consulting as much as I personally can, and be more in the mode of scholarship and writing because I don't know how much longer the client world is going to be able to make room for the kinds of work that I personally want to do. Closing Jorge: Well Dan, I would love to hear more about what that might be. And I would like to extend you an invitation to do another recording with me, if you are open to it, to explore that and the notion of architecting the thing that architects the thing, somehow, right? Because that's what is implied in what you're saying, I think. But for now, where can folks follow up with you? Dan: Well, I think maybe BASIC would be a good way to start. So if you go to understandinggroup.com/basic, you can download a PDF of the most recent version of the little mini booklet. I've created an instructional video for how to cut and fold said booklet so that it has its maximum booklet-iness for you when you make it. And from there I... yeah, I'm omni-available, except through Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram. Jorge: You're not going Meta. Dan: I would accept money from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to research the potential for harm to human beings, through what they intend to do in the so-called metaverse. But I'm not willing to use their products. Jorge: It sounds like that might yet be another reason for us to have a second conversation here. But I'll just allude to it because I'll include links to the stuff that you've been discussing on the show. And, I'll just reiterate that the booklet is beautiful, simple, useful. I have one printed out and keep it on my desk. So, I encourage folks to check it out. Thank you, Dan, for... Dan: The only thing better than that for me Jorge, is if I could be little and be there on your desk instead of the booklet, but that's... I'd love that. Jorge: I can see you on a little screen here. On a little window in my screen, so... it's not the same, but it's... it'll have to do for now. Well, thank you so much for being with us, Dan. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Dan: Let's talk again.

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Nathan Shedroff is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and a colleague at the California College of the Arts, where we both teach in the graduate interaction design program. Nathan has worked for a long time on driving innovation and sustainability through design. This conversation focuses on his latest project: Foodicons, which is creating a shared, open-source, and royalty-free iconographic language of food. Show notes Nathan Shedroff @nathanshedroff on Twitter California College of the Arts MDES Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable by Nathan Shedroff Foodicons Green Brown Blue The Lexicon The Noun Project Foodicons collection Evapotranspiration Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman Multimedia Demystified Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Nathan, welcome to the show. Nathan: Hi! Thanks for having me, Jorge. Jorge: Well, I'm very excited to have you here. For folks who might not know you, would you mind, please, introducing yourself? About Nathan Nathan: Sure. I'm Nathan Shedroff, and I've been a designer all my life in various forms. These days, I teach full-time at California College of the Arts, in the Masters of Dxesign and Interaction Design program. But I've been teaching there for 21 years now, I think, in a variety of capacities from starting out in Industrial Design, which my undergrad degree is in — I'm actually a car designer by training — in sustainable design and interaction design, and experience design. I've also started the design MBA program — the business program at CCA — I've been at that for ten years and then transferred to this program. So, I have a long-ranging design background in my career, as well as teaching. I consult a lot. I've had several companies. I've been part of several companies, and I've written a bunch of books and do a lot of speaking when conferences happen. Jorge: Several of those books have… well, I have pretty much all of them on my bookshelf, and several have been influential to me. One of them that I'm going to call out is called Design Is The Problem, which you alluded to: sustainable design. And that one is centered on that. I've been wanting to talk with you for a long time and wanted an excuse to get you on the show. I'm curious about a project that you've been working on recently about food icons, and I'm hoping you'll tell us about that. The Foodicons project Nathan: Sure. The Foodicons project sort of fell in my lap about two years ago. A friend that I knew brought it to me and said, "Hey, I see this need." He was running a bunch of food innovation accelerators, and one of the things that he found continuously in dealing with so many people throughout the food system globally is that they didn't really share a language. And I don't just mean that they didn't speak the same human language, but they had terms that they use that other people didn't. There was so much misunderstanding across the silos in the food system that he saw a need and an opportunity through these accelerators to build something that might bridge that. So this is Douglas Gayeton from the Green Brown Blue accelerators, and he has a website called The Lexicon. And he's been working in the food system, documenting them. And in fact, if you go to his website, there are these beautiful information art pieces that he does with photography, trying to explain important concepts in the food system. So he brought this to me, and I thought it was... It certainly looked really interesting. Little did I know it would take over my life, which is how a lot of these pet projects run! And so, we brought it into the food lab accelerators for six months, and I worked with a bunch of food experts across the spectrum of the food systems. And We started really configuring how we would build a global visual language for food if we had the opportunity to do this. So, it was always conceived as an iconographic language. And, of course, there was no budget for any of this. And if you were to go hire designers out in the world to build a language of, you know, 800 plus icons, that's a lot of money. And so, the only way that we could see that this was ever going to get done was to crowdsource it internationally. So after we graduated out of the accelerator and became our own 501c3, that's exactly what we did. We set up a series of challenges. We're now at the start or in the midst of the fourth challenge, where we ask designers all over the world if they want to volunteer and help design some of these icons. And they go through a design process with three rounds with a sketch round, and then they get a critique from both design experts as well as food experts, specifically in those categories of the food system, and then they respond to that hopefully and go through a design round and then get more critique, and then go through a refinement round. And what ends up is a set of icons for us to approve or choose between to go into the final category and into the final collection. And so, we've done this three times already. It's been really successful and really interesting and fun, and a lot of work as well. And, the results of those challenges are about 400 icons so far. And they're showing up on the foodicons.org website now, and there's a library there. And they're showing up on The Noun Project, which of course, many of your listeners know is like the biggest repository of icons in the world as well. They're completely free to use by anyone. The challenge here was how do we get so many independent people all over the world who have different backgrounds to design within a system so that what comes out of them looks like they're part of a family. And the major thanks to this goes to the designers at Adobe Systems in the Adobe design group, because they took it on as their yearly challenge this year to do this project with us. And so Nayane, Isabelle, and Sonja developed the design system for these icons in the beginning. They developed some of the original icons. We actually — funny enough — ran a prototype of this at CCA with one of the classes to sort of vet out what the issues were going to be. But then Adobe came in and designed a system for us that we've then made available to any other designers that want to participate. And there's an icon template in Illustrator and a little bit of an icon library with components. And some really, I think, fairly clear instructions. And we've watched designers all over the world respond to these and make these beautiful, clear, communicating icons. You know, it's probably one of the biggest design projects in the world, just because it's involved so many people and it's been distributed in this open-source kind of way. We've essentially... I'm sorry, crowdsource is a better word for this. Jorge: Yeah. I was reading a press release about the project, and I don't think you've mentioned AIGA but, is AIGA one of the partners as well? Nathan: They were initially, and this is one of the weirdnesses in... as you know, you're in the design industry. There are a lot of controversies in the design industry these days, and they had to bow out because of one of the controversies. Jorge: Oh, that's unfortunate. The reason I bring it up is that there was a quote from the executive director at AIGA, who said that this was the largest collaborative design project in history. Nathan: I think that might be right, yeah. The food system Jorge: That's astonishing. But to take a step back, when you say "the food system," what does that entail? Because I expect that food is a subject that we all... obviously we all have to deal with food, right? But where are the boundaries of this domain that this set of icons is looking to describe? Nathan: That's a great question. I'm not sure I can answer it fully, but it certainly encompasses everyone that has a hand in getting food from where it's grown and created to where it's consumed. And that is a lot of people. I believe it's probably the biggest industry globally in the world because, you know, we all eat every day, hopefully. We have a video on our website that one of our designers, Laurent in Belgium, I believe, says one of the things that he was so excited about being a part of this project is because it touches so many people. And everyone eats every day, hopefully, right? Those are his words. And they're true. So, it's something everyone can relate to. Many of us don't really know the intricacies of the global food system, but obviously, there are people who grow food on farms or raise animals for food. But there are also the people that focus on the soil and the water and the climate and the conditions that affect that growing. And then once that food is grown, there are so many things that happen to it before it gets to our mouths — even to our homes: there are distributors and retailers and wholesalers and preparers and manufacturers, there are restauranteurs and cooks and chefs and a million kinds of farmers and butchers, and you can imagine all the systems that are involved with just getting food from where it's grown, to us. And then there's ourselves — where we buy food in stores and packaging and eating and cooking. Cooking and recipes are a huge part of our experience with food, right? It really is something that touches everyone, and it is incredibly far-ranging. And so, we've tried to pick and prioritize the terms that will cover as much of that as possible with an understanding that there's a lot of new techniques and concepts coming around food that are going to be important. So we have specifically focused the challenges around things like regenerative agriculture, climate change, agrobiodiversity, food loss and waste, aquaculture, as well as some of the other issues that maybe aren't always top of mind in people's minds about food, but equity and governance... the money part of the food system, the social benefits, et cetera. We have curated these lists with the help of a bunch of food experts from all over the world, from all over these systems. We have a list of a little over 800 terms that we are halfway through, and hopefully, by the end of the year, we'll have the other half, and we'll have this set of icons that anyone can use to help describe what they're doing in their part of the food system and what's important to them. Jorge: Is that list of terms browsable? I would imagine that you all have made it public, for the purpose of the competition? Or... Nathan: Well, it certainly will be once this last challenge is over. As I said, we're slowly putting up all these icons. We can only work so quickly, even on our own site. But we have hundreds of icons sitting already submitted at the Noun Project, waiting for their approval. So, once they're up, then obviously, you can see what those terms are. We have not published the list of terms before the challenge. I think just because it never occurred to us to. Not to mention we... you know, like any design project at the last minute, you reshuffle things, and you change some of the details, and you modify things because of different opportunities or different decisions about priorities. So, I'm not sure that it would have helped anyone to have that list published beforehand, but the list will certainly be available once all the icons are up there. Jorge: The reason why I was asking is that this strikes me as such an enormous challenge, where you are opening up to literally anyone in the world to contribute to this visual vocabulary. I would imagine that there are... I'm going to describe them as rails in place to ensure that you don't get an overwhelming number of submissions for the same term and then very few submissions for something more obscure. Something like that, right? The structure of the challenge Nathan: Well, so the way that we've structured this challenge... first of all, the entire thing is built in Google Drive, using, for the most part, Google Slide decks. So when designers have signed up, they've automatically been given a set of anywhere from five to 10 terms — concepts — in their particular personal google Slide Deck, which is a workbook basically. And so, the work that they do gets transferred into corresponding judging workbooks so that our food experts and design experts can make commentary and critique on them. All that gets transferred back into each designer's personal deck, and we do that three times. So, as a designer signing up, you just get handed a set of terms, and you react to the ones that you think you have ideas for. And most of the designers have submitted ideas for all of the terms in their decks. Sometimes some of the more difficult ones, or the obscure ones, don't get coverage. And so, there are many designers in each category working on the same set of terms. So, we see different kinds of ideas coming from different people. And some of the critiques we do is if we absolutely see that, of these five designers working on the same terms, this icon by this designer is clearly going to be more successful than the rest, then part of the critique we give people is to either refocus them on other icons, on other terms that they're working on, because we don't want them to waste their time, of course. Or, focus them on other ideas for that same icon that seemed just as strong. We have had some instances with some of the words like spicy, frozen, hot, cold, et cetera, where you get a bunch of icons that look identical because everyone has the same idea. Fine. But we have other icons and terms where... you know, evapotranspiration, which is a process that plants go through to release oxygen. You know, maybe only of the five designers that are in that category — or the three, or the 15, or whatever — maybe really only one of them has a good... what we think is a good visualization of that, that we think it'll end up being successful because we have not just design experts looking at it and judging it from a design standpoint. But we have food experts judging it too, and are basically saying, "yeah, that's not really communicating that," and, "that's not really how that works," right? So we will... like I said, sort of refocus some of the designers elsewhere on the rest of the terms in their deck if their idea isn't going to be fruitful in the end. Jorge: What was the term again? I think that Zoom cut it out a little bit. Nathan: Oh, it's evapotranspiration. And in fact, there's this really good grouping. Having got 400 icons now, we see patterns that are really interesting and probably worth talking about. And we see examples that really talk about what happens when you create a global language. And so, photorespiration, evapotranspiration, and photosynthesis is this nice set of three icons that all sound similar, that all relate to how plants use carbon dioxide, create oxygen, use moisture in the air. And so, they become this really interesting case study in three icons about the differences between these processes when all three are essentially scientific terms. Jorge: What other patterns have become manifest as the language has developed? The emergence of a language Nathan: Yeah, one of the most interesting is that when I say language, we are absolutely creating a visual language here because what has emerged from the visual work and the designs are visual elements — design elements — that are clearly standing in for words, terms, and languages. So, we've seen a bunch of these things. We originally, in the library, had a hand that sort of... inside view of a hand sort of holding nothing in the middle of the icon, but just sort of a side view of a hand. And that has come to mean in this visual language either care, or management, or friendly, so that what has emerged is that if you put a flame over that hand, it becomes fire management, as in fire management procedures, in a park, or in a farm, or in an area. If you put a bird over that hand, it becomes a sign of bird-friendly, so farms that are doing what they can to make sure the birds can healthily co-exist in their farm. And so, all these things that come into play in front of that hand have had a similar meaning because they have a similar design element. Another one is two hands of appropriate size, next to each other... and of equal size, I should say. And so, if you put those in the icon and then put the same thing in each hand, that has come to mean equity. So, if you put something like an apple in each, that's about food equity. If you put money in each, that's about wage equity. And so we've found these visual signifiers of concepts that are being now used as a language would and recombined in different ways within the iconographic language. Jorge: What I hear there — and I just want to reflect it off to you — is that when we traditionally think of icons, we think of them for their semiotic value, right? I'm thinking of when you're driving down the road, and you see a sign that says that the road might be slippery. And that communicates like a single idea. But what you're hinting at here is that the vocabulary has evolved in such a way that you're able to express more complex ideas that are like composites. Some are like little sentences. Nathan: Yeah, just like you would imagine any language being, right? Jorge: Yeah. These are pictographs that are able to express more complex thoughts. Nathan: Well and the design system that Adobe created is really more edging towards what I would call symbols than maybe on the other side of the equation would be icons. They really look more like the kinds of symbols you would find in an industrial symbol system. But it's proven very facile in its ability to be applied to so many topics and so many elements and come out as an interesting language. And by all means, the designers worldwide who have produced these icons deserve the majority of the credit here in taking these simple elements and making what are sometimes incredibly complex concepts clear with just a few elements. Jorge: The first time that I became aware of your work was through Richard Saul Wurman's book_ Information Architects_, which is a book that was foundational to me, to my work. And you are one of the featured people in that book. That book is like a monograph of different folks who are doing work that Mr. Wurman, I guess, thought exemplified this field that he was trying to describe in this book. And I was revisiting that book yesterday in preparation for our conversation today. And one of your projects that is highlighted there was a book for Apple called Multimedia Demystified. And I noticed that that book had a kind of system of icons that were used to guide the reader or to help develop an understanding of what the reader was looking at. And, I just wanted to mention that because it felt to me like related to this work. And the reason I'm mentioning that is I'd love to know how you expect that these food icons can be used by folks to improve the way that they talk about and collaborate on food-related issues. Nathan: Yeah. So, it's funny you should bring up these books. You know, Demystified Multimedia, in fact, was this... you know, it was this great project that we did back in, you know, '93, maybe '94? And here we were talking about interactive media at kind of the dawn of interactive media. We were calling it "multi media" at the time. And we were wrestling with and learning about what was so different about these media, you know, to earn the title, "new media" from other media. And so, in figuring that out — and I still teach that to this day; in three weeks, I have a course at CCA starting up called foundations of essentially interactive media — so we're still wrestling with this idea of what the hell is interactivity anyway? And what is different between it and "old" media. And that book was a fun exploration of taking a lot of the ideas in interactive media and pulling them back into, in this case, print book publishing — because there are lots of things that you can do in a book to make them just a little bit interactive, not truly interactive, but to give them more varied uses for different kinds of purposes, so that different people could more easily navigate and find the things that were appropriate to them then they would in, you know, a book that was arranged and organized in a standard way. As far as the foodicons, we're talking about much rawer material, I think. These are icons that need to stand alone. They work as a collection, but there's no use for them all in one collection unless you're doing a library or a retrospective. You know, you would never see — God forbid — 800 of them together in one use. But we do expect them to be used together for different kinds of purposes, and one of the things that many people often miss about this project is that, you know, we all eat. We're all consumers of food at some point, so the first uses we think of are sort of consumer-uses, eater-uses. So, showing up on menus and indicating a special diet like vegan or Ayurveda, showing up on packaging to talk about ingredients, et cetera, which we all hope happens. And are part of this... the use of these icons, once people start using them. But really. The intent of this project has always really focused on the industry using it. Not consumers, but professionals throughout that huge food system that we described, using it to better communicate amongst themselves. And hopefully, that leads to better collaboration. So that's been a bunch of the focus of this. Lessons from the project Jorge: That's great. I have one final question for you. Given your trajectory in doing this type of work — and you've, you've hinted at the fact that you've been doing this type of work for a long time if your work was being published in the mid-nineties, right? — I'm wondering what, if anything, you feel like you've learned as a result of working on this foodicons project? Nathan: Wow, that's a great question. I don't think I... I probably don't have a great answer. I know that it's been personally gratifying to have my hands back in design in such a concrete way. You know, I deal a lot with consulting and strategy, and I don't do a lot of screen design these days. When I have to, I do, but I don't have my hands in the artifacts of design very often. And yet, for the last year, year and a half, my hands have been in the icon-making world in a really visceral way. So that's been incredibly satisfying. At a larger level, though, I think that one of the things that have been gratifying, or appears to me, is that there is so much capability out there that is probably somewhat unsung. And that these designers that have contributed their time and energy to this project have done such great work that it's not just a testament to each of them individually and their skills, but it's sort of a testament to design. Like, what can the industry of design do when they pull together on a large project? I think there were probably low expectations that you could even do something like this. That you could pull off an icon set of 800 different icons of really complex concepts, in some cases, by designers who have never worked on these before, never worked together, never talked to each other, right? And some of them had never been icon designers before. So, in some ways, I think maybe that's the biggest triumph. It shows that designers are dedicated enough and malleable enough, and gracious enough, and up for a good challenge, and when you put that thinking process and those skills, even to something you've never done before, there's still a clear path that leads to something successful. Jorge: It sounds like the biggest takeaway here is the ability for us to tap into the sort of collective intelligence that we usually read about the internet enabling, but from a design perspective, or using design practices. Nathan: It is not a surprise that you've figured out how to say what I said way more eloquently than me. Closing Jorge: Thank you. This all sounds so great, Nathan. Where can folks follow up to find out more about either the project or about yourself? Nathan: Yeah! So for Foodicons, you can go to foodicons.org, which is just spelled food icons dot org. And there's information about the challenges and what most people will probably be there for is the library as we keep posting these, which will hopefully be 800 icons by maybe the end of October. That's probably the most expedient place to go look for them. You'll also be able to find them at The Noun Project. And in both places, you can download them and freely use them for whatever you want. One thing I should probably say is that one of the controversies around this is whether it's okay for designers to volunteer their time. And one of the things that we made sure of to both honor the designers and the aim of the project is that every designer around the world that built these owns their work. They own the legal rights to their work, except that they have also granted — on the side of that — free use license in perpetuity for anyone in the world to use them for any use except commercial use. Meaning, selling the icon, right? So if someone down started downloading these and made hats and shirts out of them — that wasn't the designer and sold those — that's a no-no. Designers keep their rights for that. But there's no problem with anyone anywhere in the food system, including a restaurant, from going to the Noun Project or our site and downloading one of these icons for their use. And so, we are really happy about balancing the needs and rights of people in order to make this as viable a project as possible. I guess that's sort of the business-y, nitty-gritty background of many design projects is it's not just about the design. It's about the system that makes it possible. Jorge: That's great. Thank you for being here with us today and for sharing this fantastic project with us. Nathan: It's my pleasure. Thank you for even being interested in it, Jorge.

Harriet Pattison met renowned architect Louis Kahn in 1953 at Yale, but the real sparks flew years later in Philadelphia where she and Lou Kahn had a romantic relationship and a son, Nathaniel. It was, um, complicated. Pattison is an accomplished landscape architect, working in the Vermont office of the famous Dan Kiley and studied landscape architecture under Ian McHarg at the University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts. She collaborated with Kahn on a number of projects, especially fulfilling, after his death in 1974, the 2012 completion of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in New York City. In 2016 she was inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Her new book is Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn. Joining Pattison is former Kahn staff members Richard Saul Wurman and Reyhan Larimer, plus Steve Kroeter, publisher of a re-released book on Kahn.

RSW on TED. It's the QUESTION not the ANSWER. Richard Saul Wurman is an American architect and graphic designer. Wurman has written, designed, and published 90 books and created the TED conference, as well as the EG conference, TEDMED, and the WWW suite of gatherings.

Authors on the Air host Pam Stack welcomes author Gloria Nagy to the studio. GLORIA NAGY is the internationally best-selling author of twelve books including The Beauty, Remain Calm, Looking For Leo, SeaSick, Marriage, and the New York Times best-seller, A House in the Hamptons. She Lives with her husband Richard Saul Wurman in Miami, FL. They have four children, six grandchildren and a yellow lab, Jacob. About PEOPLE DIE IN SUNSHINE: People Die in Sunshine is the carnival ride through the externally glamorous, but internally twisted lives of those two people, Frederick and Coco Rothenstein and their world; one most of us only know about from reading true crime stories and news accounts of the lives of the super-rich and entitled dwellers in the bastions of wealth and privilege where families such as the Rothensteins reign. The first four words of Gloria Nagy's scorching, ironic tale of greed, glamour, envy, avarice and the Janus headed coin of love and hate are: "Money. Money. Money. Money." What Ms. Nagy accomplishes in a work of humor, heartbreak, murder, and redemption reinforces those four words. A theme reflecting the world we have created that rises and falls with the same quite simple motivation that has driven every facet of human life since man stood upright. It is not the world we want to see, but it is the real world and where better to set a novel that is as much a social chronicle of our times as it is a gripping tale of the maze like search for a killer, than Miami. @copyrighted. Support for this podcast is provided by Author-Guide David Ivester, with our gratitude.

Authors on the Air host Pam Stack welcomes author Gloria Nagy to the studio. GLORIA NAGY is the internationally best-selling author of twelve books including The Beauty, Remain Calm, Looking For Leo, SeaSick, Marriage, and the New York Times best-seller, A House in the Hamptons. She Lives with her husband Richard Saul Wurman in Miami, FL. They have four children, six grandchildren and a yellow lab, Jacob. About PEOPLE DIE IN SUNSHINE: People Die in Sunshine is the carnival ride through the externally glamorous, but internally twisted lives of those two people, Frederick and Coco Rothenstein and their world; one most of us only know about from reading true crime stories and news accounts of the lives of the super-rich and entitled dwellers in the bastions of wealth and privilege where families such as the Rothensteins reign. The first four words of Gloria Nagy's scorching, ironic tale of greed, glamour, envy, avarice and the Janus headed coin of love and hate are: "Money. Money. Money. Money." What Ms. Nagy accomplishes in a work of humor, heartbreak, murder, and redemption reinforces those four words. A theme reflecting the world we have created that rises and falls with the same quite simple motivation that has driven every facet of human life since man stood upright. It is not the world we want to see, but it is the real world and where better to set a novel that is as much a social chronicle of our times as it is a gripping tale of the maze like search for a killer, than Miami. @copyrighted. Support for this podcast is provided by Author-Guide David Ivester, with our gratitude.

Authors on the Air host Pam Stack welcomes author Gloria Nagy to the studio. GLORIA NAGY is the internationally best-selling author of twelve books including The Beauty, Remain Calm, Looking For Leo, SeaSick, Marriage, and the New York Times best-seller, A House in the Hamptons. She Lives with her husband Richard Saul Wurman in Miami, FL. They have four children, six grandchildren and a yellow lab, Jacob. About PEOPLE DIE IN SUNSHINE:  People Die in Sunshine is the carnival ride through the externally glamorous, but internally twisted lives of those two people, Frederick and Coco Rothenstein and their world; one most of us only know about from reading true crime stories and news accounts of the lives of the super-rich and entitled dwellers in the bastions of wealth and privilege where families such as the Rothensteins reign. The first four words of Gloria Nagy's scorching, ironic tale of greed, glamour, envy, avarice and the Janus headed coin of love and hate are: "Money. Money. Money. Money." What Ms. Nagy accomplishes in a work of humor, heartbreak, murder, and redemption reinforces those four words. A theme reflecting the world we have created that rises and falls with the same quite simple motivation that has driven every facet of human life since man stood upright. It is not the world we want to see, but it is the real world and where better to set a novel that is as much a social chronicle of our times as it is a gripping tale of the maze like search for a killer, than Miami. @copyrighted.  Support for this podcast is provided by Author-Guide David Invester, with our gratitude.

The ability to debate, to explore and to challenge has (some would say) been under immense pressure in these times. Today, I explore this with Nico Macdonald and how all of our role of society especially those in the creative industries can be more 't' shaped and diverse in consideration, thinking and action.[0 Min] How to access time with Matt on your project / sign up to the Daily Dose of inspiration[2 Mins]  An introduction to Nico Macdonald, Nico is a pioneer in innovation and entrepreneurship. He is a visiting fellow at the School of Arts and Creative Industries at London South Bank University, and teaches at the University of East London and CIEE (the Council on International Educational Exchange). In the early 90s built a digital media studio in Shoreditch, London; led digital design for The Guardian newspaper, and for the London office of Berlin-based MetaDesign; he co-founded the international consultancy business Ascendant Partners, and worked in Silicon Valley. Since, he has founded a media innovation startup, Media Futures; been Innovation Director of Creative England; and Chief Executive of the R&D Society, a professional membership organisation. For 30 years, he has forged strong links with industry contacts from established organisations as varied the BBC, the Design Council, the British Film Institute, Arup, and DigitasLBi, as well as a wide range of start-ups and SMEs in design, media and tech. He has also written extensively on creativity and digital innovation, including articles, papers and books.[3 Mins 30] Getting 'out of the bubble' and ensuring the ability to debate.[6 Mins] The limitations of the creative industries and diverse thinking.[8 Mins 30] Sustainability, and a ground where more success has been made?[10 Mins 30] Learning from journalism and following the facts Richard Saul Wurman's  CTA to 'listen'.[12 Mins 30] The ability to be exposed to others with different views.[14 Mins] The Internet = less the global village, more the place to reinforce our niche views via the 'filter bubble'[16 Mins] The Polemic Palace and Netflix.[18 Mins] Seeking more diverse arguments and looking for a healthy discourse. Seek that which you don't agree with.[19 Mins] Nuzzle, your social graph and aggregated varied points of view[20 Mins 30] Why no uncertainty in politics leads  us all to disbelief and distrust?[22 Mins 30] What can we learn from Andy Murray, Ed Balls and Michael Portillo?[23 Mins 30] What about  Jeremy Corbyn, Nigel Farage and Populism?[26 Mins] We are at the end of a political paradigm. Yes, it's uncomfortable.[30 Mins] The case of paradigm under-load.[35 Mins] Design Ethics, Microsoft to MIT and a convSupport the show (https://weareten.us12.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=4ed5154e0f1cdbad62b378156&id=dc1a8d24c1)

Visionary attorney Matt Homann shares insights garnered from practicing law as a solo lawyer, and as a consultant who now helps businesses innovate in practical ways. Among the topics discussed are the joys and practical benefits of systematically firing clients, the “ideal average client,” and Matt’s unique “client worthiness index.” Below are some resources mentioned in this episode: Filament (Matt’s company) The Monday Morning Meeting - Matt’s weekly email tips for helping you prepare for the coming week. Matt’s Twitter stream - filled with pithy actionable business advice. Practically In Person - Matt’s virtual meeting & collaborative online facilitation program. Thinksgiving - Matt’s initiative for helping non-profits get help with innovation and business strategy. Information Anxiety, by Richard Saul Wurman (book mentioned by Ernie) The Continuum of Understanding (mentioned by Ernie) And here’s a link to my Solo & Small Firm Lawyers’ Guide to Working Smarter (which is designed to help make your practice more automated & virtual —and less dependent on you doing all the work and making most of the decisions)   Thanks to Our Sponsor Smith.ai; is an amazing virtual receptionist service that specializes in working with solo and small law firms. When you hire Smith.ai; you’re actually hiring well-trained, friendly receptionists who can respond to callers in English or Spanish. Then can screen callers (obviously) but they do much more. Like create appointments and accept payments if you charge for initial consults (which you should!). And they do this 7 days a week. The best part is they don’t just handle these conversations by phone — they also have 24/7 live agents and chatbots capturing leads on websites and via text message (even via Facebook Messenger). If there’s one great outsourcing opportunity for your practice, this is it. Let Smith.ai have your back while you stay focused on your work, knowing that your clients and prospects are being taken care of. Plans start at just $140 a month for calls or chats. And they have a special offer for podcast listeners where you can get an extra $100 discount with promo code ERNIE100. Sign up for a free trial now (and learn more) at www.smith.ai;. As they say, “don’t let another day go by without trying Smith.ai.”     EPISODE CREDITS: If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment. He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world. Find out more at emeraldcitypro.com

There is nothing conventional about Richard Saul Wurman, the Founder of the TED conferences and the author of 91 books. He is indefatigable, brilliant, charismatic, and very funny. And if you listen carefully, he might share with you the secrets of the universe.

Information overload created by digital technology causes us a lot of anxiety. But the real source of trouble is less obvious. Once you get clear about the root cause of anxiety you can better understand how to counteract it. Information Anxiety, by Richard Saul Wurman (an invaluable guidebook for dealing with data overload) Download out my Basic Guide to Working Smarter if you want to learn how to make technology work for you, not against you. Check out my Law Firm Autopilot program if you want a more comprehensive blueprint for transforming your practice. Thanks to Our Sponsors Smith.ai; is a superior virtual receptionist service for small businesses. They specialize in working with solo and small law firms. Smith.ai; offers friendly receptionists who can respond to callers in English or Spanish, screen and schedule new leads, and even take payment for consults. And they do this 7 days a week. The best part is they don’t just handle these conversations by phone — they also have 24/7 live agents and chatbots capturing leads on websites and via text message (even via Facebook Messenger). If there’s one growth hack for your practice, this is it. Smith’s friendly gatekeepers can staff your front lines while you work uninterrupted. You can finally have the peace of mind that while you’re working, you’re not missing out on future work. Plans start at just $140 a month for calls or chats. They even offer a totally free chatbot, so there’s no excuse! Try Smith.ai today and see for yourself why attorneys like Justie Nicol in Colorado say Smith.ai; receptionists are the “secret to business growth and client happiness.” Smith.ai; offers a free trial, and podcast listeners get an extra $100 discount with promo code ERNIE100. Sign up and learn more at www.smith.ai;. Trust me when I say, “Don’t let another day go by!” Try Smith.ai; . AND… Tracers; Gathering information is important for lawyers, especially lawyers who do litigation. As you no doubt know, law doesn’t win cases, facts do, and often one or two key facts can make or break a case. Key facts are tied to witnesses who sometimes are elusive. Key facts can involve things about your client that they conveniently “forget” to tell you. And for sure key facts are incriminating things about the opposing party. Key facts can be in social media or any number of public databases. So how do you find the key facts quickly and easily? Well, you can find them but not usually quickly and easily. Even the publicly available information is strewn about in lots of different public records or online locations that you can’t find using one Google search. So stop trying to use Google and don’t waste time, energy, or money. Use Tracers; instead. That’s how you can get cost-effective access to asset records, social media posts, and detailed background information on anyone of interest to you or your client. The cost is based on a “pay per search” pricing with a $39 monthly minimum. The searches aren’t super expensive so you might only spend $39 per month and be able to do a few searches. But however much you use it you can expense the cost to your client matter because it’s an essential service. I recommend that every lawyer at least sign up , learn what it can do, and get used to having an amazing resource at your fingertips. If you use the promo code Ernie100 the first $100 of your search will be free. * EPISODE CREDITS: If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment. He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

In which we are joined by Maria Giudice, founder of Hot Studio, former design executive at Facebook and Autodesk, for a whirlwind discussion of her career, design leadership, and coaching. Topics: Frank Frazetta; Working Girl; art school; white designer dudes; New York in the mid-80s; Richard Saul Wurman telling us we're all full of shit; designing guidebooks; command-and-control leadership style; San Francisco in the late 80s; becoming a design leader; hiring misfits; match between leader and the team; inheriting teams; the brutality of corporate America; learning from mistakes; change-making at scale; consulting vs in-house; the need for executive sponsorship; where we find joy in our lives; meaning and purpose in our work; leading and coaching in a fashion authentic to you; the value of coaching for senior leaders.

Adam’s links:On LinkedInOn FacebookITG AmericaStuff we talk about:“Stop Stealing Dreams" — Seth Godin’s TEDx talk on a new way of learning“Stop Stealing Dreams” — the full article“Limitless” by Jim KwikArchitect/designer/author Richard Saul Wurman who created the TED ConferenceEpisode 2 with Patrick Fredrickson where we talk about home-schoolingSugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” TED TalkLarry Martinek and MathnasiumMastery-based learningZoomSkype for Business (now Microsoft Teams)Time Zone converterCommon Core standardsInternational Baccalaureate standardsFor more tips, tools and posts about working from home, visitworklifeathome.comYou can subscribe on your favorite podcatcher app —  Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn and PocketCast  — or wherever you normally listen.And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It'll help other people find us. Thanks! Music: Happy Theme by maxmakessounds and Atrium Loop by dpren used under standard Creative Commons attribution license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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My guest today is Maria Giudice. Maria founded Hot Studio, a design consultancy that was acquired by Facebook in 2013. After leaving Facebook, she served as VP of Design at Autodesk. In this conversation, Maria reveals how she found her purpose, and shares with us the exciting next stage of her career. Listen to the full conversation   Show notes Maria Giudice on LinkedIn Maria Giudice on Facebook Hot Studio Richard Saul Wurman Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman Cooper Union Fortran Massimo Vignelli The yellow pages CCA Cartography Macintosh IIci Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator Times New Roman Helvetica Mosaic web browser Netscape Frank Frazetta Italic script The Speedball Textbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Pen and Brush Lettering by Joanne Fink Autodesk Clement Mok The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design by Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland Rise of the DEO posts in Medium Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: Maria, welcome to the show. Maria: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here with you, Jorge. Jorge: Well, I'm very excited that you've agreed to come on. So, for folks who might not know you, how do you describe what you do and what you've been doing; your trajectory? Maria: Boy, that's a good question because I feel like I keep changing and growing. So, I'll go from one end, from being a child. I considered myself a fine artist and now that I'm a woman in her fifties, I am a, a design leadership coach and consultant. And a lot of stuff happened in between. Jorge: I was about to ask. I think there's a lot of… There's a big gap between those two. I'll tell you what I know, because we've known each other, but my awareness of you proceeds my knowing you in person. And I knew two things about you before I met you. One was that you founded a design agency or consultancy called Hot Studio. Maria: Yes. Jorge: And I also know that at one point you worked with Richard Saul Wurman. Maria: I did. Yes. Great, then you got two data points in a sea of many years of data points. Jorge: I think that the first time that I became aware of you, I believe it was in the Information Architects book. Maria: Yeah. I was sitting my twenties when I was featured in that book. And you know, Richard coined the phrase “information architects” back in the day. Jorge: Absolutely. Maria: I started out as a fine artist, went to art school. I went to Cooper Union in New York City. One of the beautiful things about Cooper Union as an art school was it was art, engineering, and architecture. It was founded in the 1800s by Peter Cooper. And when I went to art school, I had no understanding of the interrelationship between art, architecture, and engineering. They just seemed like very discreet disciplines. But at Cooper, you could take an art class. I was majored in art, but I took an engineering class. I learned how to do Fortran; don't ask me why decided to do that. I could take an architecture class. And so, this interconnection between art and technology was there at the very beginning, even though I didn't realize it. And then out of school, I got to work with Richard Saul Wurman. And how I got to do that was Richard was a visiting professor in my senior design class. And I was taking graphic design classes, but I had very… I was just… I hated it. I was a painter and I took graphic design essentially to learn how to be more organized. And also, my painting teacher suggested that I do that so I don't become poor. So, I was taking graphic design for all the wrong reasons, really seeing no purpose to it. I felt like it was incredibly formulaic. It's like, “Okay, you got Bodoni, you got Helvetica, you got the classic typefaces, you got the Bauhaus. So, you create the grid. Everything should be flush left. And oh yeah, lots of white space. Throw an image out, slap it together, call it a day.” That was my version of graphic design, and I was struggling for meaning and purpose. And then Richard walks into our class, he's a visiting speaker for the day. He doesn't look anything like all the graphic designers from the 80s. It is graphic design, and we're tall. Men wearing black. Vignelli. Everybody looked so polished, and I'm a girl from Staten Island. Okay? So, I look nothing like a typical designer. And he walks in, and he looks nothing like a typical designer. Short, chubby, big scarf, and more importantly, cursing up a storm, which of course I fell in love with. And he walks in and he changed my life because he walked in, he looked at all of us. He said, “You're all full of shit.” He's like, “You're doing design for the wrong reason. Design isn't about you. It's about helping people make sense to the world.” Now, I don't know if he said that exactly, but that's what I took away, and that was like the gods coming down from the heaven telling me, “Oh. There's a purpose to this.” You know, design is about being in service to others. Our job is a service job. Helping people understand, be entertained, make sense, you know, make clarity out of chaos, all of that stuff. And that changed my trajectory for the rest of my life. And that idea about design being in service to others, carried me through my 30 year career to where I am today. That focus, that we are here to help make clarity out of chaos. So, I worked for him right out of school designing guidebooks, because that's what you did in the 80s. And another big milestone happened where he got the gig to redesign the Pacific Bell Yellow Pages. Now, do you remember the yellow pages, Jorge? Jorge: I sure do. Maria: Yeah. I mean, I teach at CCA now and I, and I ask people about the yellow pages. They don't raise their hands. It's like generationally, a gone concept. But the yellow pages was the only thing that connected people in communities together through the telephone. And he got the gig to reimagine what the yellow pages could be for all of California and Nevada, to rethink about what the value proposition could be for this. And I thought that was a) fascinating; a fascinating problem to solve at scale, and b) an easy trip to the Bay Area for a couple of months where I can hang out and enjoy the nice weather. So, I drove cross country, my best friend came here. There was no office set up, so it was like ground zero. I land, a few other people land, and then we actually have to put together a company. So, I was at the beginning of understanding how you put a company together from the ground up. And so, I worked on the yellow pages, and my specialty was cartography. I don't know if you knew that about me, but I was a master cartographer. And that came through working for Richard. And so, my job in the yellow pages was to redesign and build all the maps in all the yellow pages. And we're talking about hundreds of different yellow pages throughout California, for all of California and Nevada. So, you know, I started designing maps and I had to quickly build a team, because I couldn't do it all myself. So here I am, 24 years old trying to help bring a company to life and become instantly turned into a manager of people. And it was the dawn of the digital age. A computer landed on my desktop in 1987, it was the Mac IIci. And it had Photoshop and illustrator 1.0 and it had Times New Roman and Helvetica. And Richard embraced technology really early on, and we all were at the beginning trying to figure out how to integrate this new technology into our workflow. So, all these new things happened at the same time in my twenties. That entrepreneurial spirit was alive and well, I was part of this new horizon. And I flourished. I really took well to tech. I loved working with computers. I loved being part of the beginning of figuring out how this all works. And I turned out to be really great at managing and inspiring people to work really hard. And so, I wound up staying in California and I had a team of like 20 people. By the time I was 27, I was managing a large, large team of people. And then I got to a place where I could no longer grow. I hit the top of my game in that company, and that's when I went on my own and started freelancing. And then, the short answer here is I started freelancing, I got busy, I hired people, I got busy, I hired people. Suddenly I had a company. I had a small company. Then I had a medium sized company. Then I had a really large company. The other thing that happened was I was also part of the very early beginnings of the internet. So, my clients were like, “Hey, you think about design very differently than other people, and can you design a website?” And I'm like, “I don't know what a website is, but I'm sure I could figure it out.” And this was like 1993. Mosaic was there. Netscape was coming out. And again, we were all trying to figure out what is this new medium and how does it integrate with what we do? And that propelled my career to founding Hot Studio. Hot Studio grew to about a hundred people in two locations, New York and San Francisco. And then we sold Hot Studio to Facebook in 2013, the year I turned 50. And then I worked at Facebook for two years and went to AutoDesk to be VP of Design, and that takes me to where I am now. Two years ago, I left Autodesk, and now I'm a coach where I get to help grow the next generation of creative leaders. And that's been incredibly rewarding. So that's a long trajectory, long story. But the information design element, the design being in service to others is the consistent thread through all of those experience touchpoints. Jorge: That's great. I want to circle back on that, but before I do, I want to ask you about something you said. You said that when you were still a student, you got into it primarily because of a love for the arts. Maria: Yeah. Jorge: But it's like visual arts, right? Maria: Yeah. I started painting when I was seven or eight years old, and I used to go study painting every Friday… Every Saturday morning, I would go to Mr. [Inaudible] art studio and take a book out of his rack and paint seascapes and still lifes, and it was oil paint. My uncle is actually a very famous fantasy artists named Frank Frazetta. Jorge: I've seen Frank Frazetta's work. It's astonishing. Maria: Yeah. So, he was my uncle. And so, I was surrounded by this idea about, you know, art being something that you can thrive in. And also, the connection between painting and graphic design for me was calligraphy. I started doing calligraphy in middle school. My English teacher gave me a book on italic, and I was fascinated by the Speedball book that I bought in the art store that had all of these different, like… I wouldn't say they were typefaces, but they kind of were. And I was really good at drawing letters and I used to design band posters. So that's how I managed to peg with the cool kids, because I would design posters for bands. And also paint jean jackets. So, I was entrepreneurial at a young age, being able to apply my artistic skills to things that people needed. Jorge: You said something when you were describing your career at Cooper Union, where you said that when you made the switch from visual arts to graphic design, one of the distinctions between the two was that graphic design was more organized. Maria: Yeah. I was such a slob, and I thought that if I take graphic design classes, it would help me be a little bit more organized. Jorge: Why would that be? Maria: Because my impression of the graphic designers that were in art school, they seemed like they had their shit together. The fine artists, not so much. And so, I saw these graphic designers that were so buttoned up and I went, “Oh, I maybe could learn something about this.” Jorge: When you came to California and started a company, was that The Understanding Business? Maria: Yes, that was The Understanding Business. So, Richard had Access Press in New York, and he founded the understanding business, and the big client was Pacific bell yellow pages. Jorge: So that is an awesome overview of your career, and I've learned so much just from this short conversation. Maria: Yeah, we're done now. Right? Jorge: Yeah. No, but I want to focus on what you're doing now because you said that… Well, you've had the experience, starting out as a freelancer, and I don't want to say accidentally, but it's almost like the business grew organically. Maria: Yeah, it was accidental. Jorge: Right? By the time before the step where you find yourself now, you were running design at a fairly large organization that makes tools for designers, right? Maria: Yes. Jorge: So, you've been exposed to various different facets of the design industry, and in particular digital design, right? From being an individual contributor, all the way to being an executive in a large organization. Maria: Yeah. Jorge: And you've made the switch now to advising folks, is that right? Maria: Yeah, I have had the good fortune of being exposed to growing businesses, working in essentially startups. Right? Because The Understanding Business was a startup — my own company was a startup from the very beginning — and being in middle-sized companies, also having hundreds of clients, when I worked at Hot Studio. So, I've had this context about how people and organizations work at scale. And at Autodesk I was the VP of Design. I loved that job because I got to participate in culture change at scale, with 400 designers worldwide, and Autodesk had hundreds of products. So, the last two years of working for others, I was in corporate America. So from 2013 to 2017, end of 2017, I was essentially working in two large corporations. And I loved pieces of it, but I also hated pieces of it. And as I got older, this is what I say about people who get older: the amount of fucks you give goes to zero, right? When you get older, your priorities change. It's so hard to play the politics game. But I was fascinated by that, and I like looking at how people in organizations work together from the outside in. So I left Autodesk and I resisted jumping into another VP job. And that was actually one of the hardest things I've ever done, because I've spent my entire life building my brand and reputation. And I have a great story to tell. I've worked hard and I've accomplished a lot, and then suddenly I don't have a job anymore at the end of 2017. And I remember running into Clement Mok. He's an early mentor of mine. And he told me, “Maria, you have to promise me to take a year off.” I'd never taken a year off. Everything was one thing to the other. I had two kids. I raised kids; I have… I'm married. I did all of that nonstop. And it just, it stuck with me. He said, you need to take time to think and figure out what you want to do next. And that year was brutal because I kept saying to myself, “Who the hell am I if I don't have a name, a title, I'm not bringing in shitloads of money?” And it really made me question and challenge myself in terms of like, what's it all worth? Why am I doing what I'm doing? What's my purpose in life? All of these big, big questions. So, one thing I did in that time off is I made a list of all the classes I ever wanted to take but could never take them. My kids are teenagers now, so they ignore me. So, I have plenty of time on my hands. And I took like an improv class. I hated it, but I know it's important. I'm taking calligraphy classes again; I'm taking a watercolor class. I'm bringing back the fine art, but I also took a coaching class. And I took coaching classes because I, not necessarily wanting to be a coach, but I thought that, boy, those are great skills to have. I could always be better at listening and asking powerful questions. I'm working on another book project and I'm interviewing people and I thought that these could just really improve my listening skills. And then over the course of the year, I realized I was really good at it. That, you know, people are constantly asking me for advice. So, I said, well, if I'm going to be giving advice, I should a) be great at it, and b) get paid to do it. So, then I kind of committed and stepped over the line. I drew like an invisible line on the floor and I said, “What am I stepping into? What will I commit to?” And I committed to getting certified as a coach, which is a pretty rigorous training program. It takes about seven to eight months to do. And I should be done with my certification at the end of February, I have like over 20 clients worldwide and it gives me great energy to help people. I get to help people lead based on where they are in their career. So, it could be everything from emerging design, emerging leaders, all the way up to very senior leaders. And I get to support them without the bullshit of corporations and corporate America. I don't have to deal with their politics, they have to deal with their politics. So it gives me that insight to stay relevant and fresh in the industry that I love without dealing with the corporate bullshit. And that, that's been great. But what I want to say is, from a meta perspective — and I find this to be true with people who are leaving jobs in their 50s and asking the same kind of questions that I'm asking… There's these two phases in life. David Brooks wrote a book called The Second Mountain, and he talks about this. And the first mountain is the mountain that you climb to establish your identity, build your career, generate wealth, create status, raise a family. You know, that's the mountain. That's the trajectory that we're all climbing. And then something happens to people in their 40s and 50s, when they start really questioning what's next for them. They're at the peak, and then they're going to go down the mountain. Some of them retire, some of them get depressed, and some of them go into different careers. But what I'm finding is people in their 40s and 50s are staying in… are not retiring. They're reinventing. And they're reinventing through the context of purpose and meaning. They're starting to ask questions about what is worth doing in life? Why am I here on this earth? What can I do to support people, help people? You know, create a legacy that isn't about wealth and title. And that's the space that I'm sitting in right now. And it's like going from the outer world to the inner world, and that's been really satisfying. So, I'm doing a lot of work on myself, sort of inner work, like identifying what brings me joy and fulfillment, and making sure that I'm spending my precious time on earth in service. And it's exciting because I don't feel like I'm marching towards death. Right? I feel like I have, like… I feel lucky that at 57 years old, I feel like I'm at the beginning of a new path. Jorge: That's great. Maria: Yeah. What a gift, right? I mean, when I was in my twenties, I thought when you were 50, by the time you turned 50, you were like close to death, you know? And even though it sucks to get older, I have to say, the wisdom that you gained from your life experience is priceless. And then you have to decide how you're going to use that wisdom in, in really helpful ways. Jorge: It sounds to me like you had an experience when you were younger of someone coming into your life and helping you discover your purpose, right? You talked about Mr. Wurman and this idea that he helped you see that it was about helping people understand and make sense of things. And to bring it back to the folks listening to the show, as you go about advising people now, and helping impart this wisdom that you've gained over the years and your experiences. First of all, I'm wondering if you ever find yourself advising folks who maybe have not yet discovered that purpose, that can motivate them and that can get them to another level. And if that's the case, how do you move past that? Maria: Well, that's the part of coaching. The big part of coaching is not to give people answers, it's to guide them so that they find their own answers that resonate with them. And through those coaching sessions, we unpack values. What are things that are important to you? What are your own guiding principles in life, and how do you use those guiding principles, those values that you have, to make decisions, and to live your life authentically? A large part of the coaching journey is to help people uncover what they're meant to do on this earth, and how they can live in authentic life, and bring joy and purpose to it no matter where they are in the process. The other thing about finding Richard early in my life, who became sort of the linchpin to who I have become, we all have that. We just have to pay attention to it. I tell my students that all the time. Walk around life with your eyes wide open and pay attention to those moments. Be open to those moments that are going to… That may change your trajectory in life. And we all have them. Jorge: That is a fantastic takeaway for folks. And I think it's also a good summary of where you are now, and what you're doing to help folks. So, thank you for sharing that with us. I'm wondering, if folks want to follow up with you and perhaps reach out to see if you can help them with this, where can they reach out to you? Maria: Yeah. Well, if you go to hotstudio.com, which is still up, you could send me an email through there. Or you could just reach out to me on LinkedIn and send me a message that you're interested in coaching. That's how I found all my clients, by the way. I put out a call on LinkedIn and Facebook and I said, Hey, I'm doing this. And I got contacts from people all over the world, which was so humbling. And this is the other thing that I love about this work, that I get to be introduced to people from all over the world who want help, want coaching, and I could help them no matter where they are, whatever geography they're in. So that's been lovely. Jorge: We didn't get into this, but you're also the author of a book called Rise of the DEO, and I just wanted to mention it because I'm going to link that in the notes as well. Maria: That's great. Yeah. Actually, Rise of the DEO is my third book. The great thing about Rise of the DEO now is it's all available on Medium. So, if you are a subscriber to Medium, you can get the whole book on Medium for free. Jorge: That's great. I didn't know that. I'm going to link to that as well. Folks who are listening to this conversation, especially if they're in the design disciplines and looking to move up to leadership positions, it strikes me as something that they would be keen to follow up on. Maria: Yeah, it's actually, it's both for… I would say it's for designers, design leaders, but it's also for creative business leaders, because it talks about the interrelationship of design skills and qualities at the CEO level. And the rise of the DEO is about the rise of the Design Executive Officer. You don't have to be a designer in order to be a creative business leader, a DEO. And it talks about how you can be better at risk-taking, intuition, system design, people-centeredness. All of these things that we were trained as, as designers, are now incredibly relevant skills and characteristics in today's business world. Jorge: Well, fantastic. I'm going to link to that. Well, thank you so much for your time, Maria. This has been fantastic. Maria: Oh, it was great talking to you.

Richard Saul Wurman is the Founder of TED conferences and the author of 90 books. He shares insights from his last book “Understanding Understanding” as well as funny, wonderful stories from his life and daily experiences.

243% Richard Saul Wurman e Fernão Battistoni - FAZER ALGO MELHOR TODOS OS DIAS É QUASE CONSTRANGEDOR by Fernao Battistoni

When Saul Kaplan produced his carefully compiled spreadsheet of how he planned to host a two day summit on innovation, the last thing he expected his friend to do was tear the spreadsheet to pieces—literally.  His friend was none other than Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED, so his feedback was not something Saul could take lightly. This summit was his dream. After years of being a consultant and looking at innovation from the top-down, he knew that he wanted to put on an event that focused on innovation from the bottom-up—what Saul referred to as a “human-centered design.” He had planned everything, from how they would scale from the nano to the cosmic, but the feedback from Richard was blunt and to the point: “You have an awful lot to learn, Kaplan, about what organic engagement and connection is…Design something that you’re interested in, that you can learn from, and then allow other people to participate in that by doing it openly and transparently.” In many ways, that has become the touchpoint of the annual Business Innovation Factory (BIF) summit. Organic engagement and connection permeate each session, and the best talks are those that solve problems in the real world and discuss the human experience. Join us as we discuss his advice for anyone planning a conference or summit, what it means to “Cause a RCUS,” and how he continually finds ways to reinvent himself. Show notes and links - https://whitneyjohnson.com/saul-kaplan

This episode will introduce our listeners to the mission behind the No Barriers Podcast and what we are trying to accomplish with putting this out to our community. To start you will meet our hosts and hear about their background. Host Erik Weihenmayer discusses his background as a blind climber and being known most widely as being the first blind person to summit Mt. Everest and what got him interested in starting an organization that helps people challenge themselves to break out of the barriers that confront them in their daily lives. Jeff Evans, who was on Erik's Mt. Everest team, goes through his back story as an adventurer, speaker, and high altitude medical expert. Jeff explains what fascinates him about listening to people share their stories and his experience working with No Barriers. Dave Shurna introduces himself as the Executive Director of No Barriers and his trajectory with the organization and his desire to learn more from our guests. Jeff and Erik talk about the seeds of forming the organization, No Barriers, and how it's turned from a small endeavor into a movement that we hope to continue to expand to anyone that can benefit from this message. No Barriers podcast is about sharing stories of transformation - introducing our community to people who have encountered a barrier and have confronted it and are thriving (or working on thriving). We want to highlight that struggle and maybe unearth some nuggets of wisdom in what was discovered in that process. We hope you listen to these stories and extract meaning in your own life. Subscribe, rate, and share with your friends and family. Learn more about No Barriers --------------------------- EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ----------------------------- Erik: It's easy to talk about the triumphs, but what doesn't get talked about enough is the struggle. Erik: My name is Erik Weihenmayer. I'm an adventurer. I've climbed Mount Everest and the Seven Summits, the tallest peak on every continent, and I happen to be blind. And I can tell you it's been a struggle to live what we call a "no barriers" life--to define it, to push the parameters of what it can mean. And part of the equation of this life is understanding this process of growth that we're all striving for--to dive down into that experience and illuminate the elements, those universal elements that we have to harness along the way, like way points on a trail, like holds on a rock face, that lead us forward towards change, towards growth, towards transformation. And that unexplored terrain between those safe dark places that we find ourselves in and the summit, is a map that we can use to navigate our lives. It's a far messier, gritter map than we're led to believe, with more flailing and bleeding along the way, but there is a way forward. That map is what we call "No Barriers". Erik: This is the No Barriers podcast. Dave: Hi, this is Dave Shurna, and I am the executive director of No Barriers, sitting here with Jeff Evans and Erik Weihenmayer and, let's get this started, Erik. What are we doing here? Erik: Our first podcast. This is exciting, guys. Jeff: Christening room. Erik: I know, yes. Yeah, so- Dave: Tell us a little bit about why we're here. What do you want to accomplish here? Erik: God, where do I start? My name is Erik Weihenmayer, and I am an adventurer and a climber. I happen to be blind, so it's sort of--being a blind climber is sort of like being a Jamaican bobsledder. Erik: I was a teacher for six years. I had an idea to be a full-time climber and adventurer, which I've been doing the last twenty years. I climbed Mount Everest in 2001, with the guy that's sitting in front of me, Jeff, who we're gonna learn more about later, but that experience was so transformational that that led to this amazing climb that I did with these two guys, Mark Wellman and Hugh Herr. Erik: Mark Wellman is a paraplegic. He's my hero because he climbed El Capitan, basically seven thousand pull-ups up the rock face. Just amazing. And Hugh Herr is a double leg amputee, and he climbs with these prosthetic legs. And the three of us were like these Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We climbed together. And then, at that experience, I realized that we'd been sold the wrong ideas--that when I looked at people who excelled, like Mark and Hugh, that they didn't do it in the traditional ways that TVs and books always make it look like, that it was much gritter. It was much bloodier. There was much more struggle along the way. And so I thought, "I don't understand what that map looks like." And No Barriers, the podcast and the theme, the message that we're gonna be diving into, all grew from that first experience, because I wanna understand. Like Mark and Hugh and me, we'd all been crushed, and we had to reemerge. What does that process look like? Erik: I realize that most people in the world aren't physically disabled like the three of us, but they have invisible barriers. And so what is the process look like for people as they go from those places that they don't want to be, and they climb to the summit, whatever that looks like for each person? I wanted to understand what that gritty map is that we build and navigate with our lives. And so I'm here fleshing out this subject with amazing people that we are going to interview, because I've gotten to meet people in our No Barriers programs and experiences that have taught me so much about this topic, and I thought "We gotta highlight these people! We gotta understand what makes them tick." Erik: So Jeff and Dave and I are gonna be doing that, and Jeff is my good climbing partner, we've been climbing together for 25 years, and we climbed Everest together. And when I met Jeff he was just a dirtbag. Well, he's still kind of a dirtbag, but-- Jeff: I'm still a dirtbag. Erik: Yeah. Jeff: You can't really divert too much from that. Erik: But Jeff, even though you started as a dirtbag, you've done some amazing stuff, and you've really grown and had your own No Barriers story. Tell us a little bit about that. Jeff: Well, when you and I met, we were both very raw, and I think we met at the right point in our lives where we were just seeking. We were looking for adventure first and foremost, and then looking for allies to share it with. We met at a very fortuitous time, and we've obviously... golly, man, I mean, we've done a lot, you and I. I've had some of the best and worst moments of my life standing right next to you. Jeff: And I think that in a way, maybe that's sort of the take-home for me personally, while you and I have been such good friends and partners along the way, but also, my understanding of the human condition. I used to not want to admit it to your face, but now that I'm older and more mature and I can pat you on the back, is that you've taught me a lot. You've taught me a lot about life; in a way, you've asked me to ask questions of myself, and that's the extension of why I'm here, is that in turn, by asking questions of myself, I wanna ask questions about other people. I wanna understand who they are. I like that grit that you speak of. I like the determination, and I like how folks deal with adversity in this map that gets laid out in front of them, and all these variables that play into where we are--societally, biologically, emotionally--and I think that honestly, that was sort of the impetus behind you and I starting the Warriors program. Maybe you could tell the listeners just a little bit about that and how it came to be. Erik: Well, because it's hard to brag on yourself, I'm just gonna brag about you, because even though Jeff did start out as a dirtbag, he was a smart dirtbag and he had a No Barriers Story of his own, and he went on to climb mountains with me and also went back to medical school to get a physician assistant degree, working in emergency rooms all around the country, and then now being one of the foremost high-altitude medical experts in the world. I can't imagine having anyone next to me in the high mountains, Jeff, who I'd want more than you, because I've seen you save people's lives, putting them in hyperbaric chambers and administering IVs on mountains. Erik: Jeff, you helped us start the No Barriers Warriors program. The tenth-year anniversary of our Everest climb, we decided we're gonna do something really cool. What were we gonna do? Were we gonna do a Disney Cruise reunion? Nah, maybe not; let's do something big. So we decided to climb Labuche, twenty thousand feet, in the Himalayas, and we all got together and then we decided "Well, let's have some other people whose lives have been transformed. Let's see if we can bring together some other people whose lives might be transformed by the mountains, like us." And so we brought together a team of injured soldiers. Talk about the team just a little bit, Jeff, and the culmination of that experience, that first No Barriers Warrior experience. Jeff: We knew, I think, intrinsically, that the mountains provide this great backdrop. It's got all the ingredients that you need to have an experience that's both rich and transformative. You've got built-in adversity, the potential for a massive shitshow, but you also have this rally point, which is this summit. It can be figurative, it can be literal, but whatever it is, we rally around it, and it creates a sort of call to action. We knew that. We knew that the stage would be there for us, and so we took the chance and gathered up a group of injured veterans, in a way to say thank you to them, but also to give them the tools that we discovered, personally, along the way, and help them regain their momentum. Jeff: We hand-selected a group of folks, we took of for Nepal, and sort of set the table. We had a fair bit of adversity, but the mountain did what we wanted it to do, which was be sweet and loving and also be angry and mean. And in experiencing that, it gave us the opportunity to talk about these things, sort of distill out the learning points that can come from that, and create a loving atmosphere, create an atmosphere of fellowship. And I think that community that exists in the mountains was a big stepping stone for us, and I think another extension for us going forward. Did you even anticipate then--I mean, this was seven years ago, right? Erik: Look, let's be honest, we didn't know exactly what we were doing. And that's a good message for our audience here, and that is that a lot of times when you start an idea, it's just a little seed of an idea. That's what we had with our Warriors program, and now it's blossomed into incredible stuff, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of vets that we work with, and getting to know them and getting to know their stories, and we are gonna interview a lot of veterans on this podcast. Erik: Dave, I wanna introduce you, because you are the executive director of No Barriers. You do the real work. You lead our team and put together all these amazing, transformative expeditions behind the scenes. I met you... you came to me out of the blue and asked me if I'd help you start a program for kids, and we started out with blind kids and deaf kids teaming up with sighted and hearing kids. That's all fallen into the melting pot of No Barriers. Tell us how you got into this club. Dave: I think that my role from the beginning, as one of the powers of the organization and the executive director, has always been to build the infrastructure around this global movement that we want to create. My role is to create this organization that can take this message that you guys are alluding to here and bring it to as many populations around the world as possible. Dave: We've been doing that work for nearly fifteen years now, and so as I think about this podcast and what we're here together doing, I was at an event a couple months ago where Richard Saul Wurman was speaking, he's the founder of TED, and he said "Nobody ever writes a book or creates a script for a movie 'cause they know what the heck they're talking about, and if they tell you they do, they're lying. They write the book to learn what it is that they might already know and to discover new things." So when I think about this podcast, I think the same thing; we've been doing this work for fifteen years, with youth, with Warriors, with companies, with women, and this is partly to understand what makes people come to this movement. And as we bring in guests and learn from them, what can we take away from individuals who have overcome great odds, overcome barriers in their lives and achieved that purpose-driven life we all seek? What can we take away from that and learn and apply to our own lives? Dave: I'm here to create that organizational infrastructure, to do that with as many people as possible, and I can't wait to learn from individuals to help us do that work better. Erik: We're gonna be bringing a lot of amazing people to the world--a lot of people that haven't been highlighted in traditional podcasts, from business leaders to youth who struggle to veterans to people with physical challenges, all who have had some difficult things happen to them in their lives and have figured out little bits and pieces of that map that we all wanna walk. Erik: I just wanna lastly say that I think we're gonna try to be different, because when I went blind--it was my freshman year in high school--I remember realizing that when you look out on the world, it can kinda lead you astray. I was blaming and attacking and reacting and responding, and saying "Why me?", and I realized that I was looking in the wrong place--that what I had to do was to turn inward and find out what I could grow inside myself, and how I grew that thing and nurtured that thing and used it to blaze into the world. I think, if we succeed, what we're gonna do is really dive down beneath the surface of people and try to understand what that internal landscape looks like--how they go from those places that they wind up and they don't necessarily wanna be there, to the summit, to that incredible place of purpose and fulfillment that we're all looking for. What are the way points along the way? Let's identify those so that we can dissect this No Barriers life and we can all learn. Dave, what do you say? Dave: I think that's why we're all here. One of the things I loved about our conversation when we thought about starting this podcast was: We've heard lots of podcasts, we've met lots of people, and one of the things we feel is missing is, no one really dives deep into talking about the struggle. It's often glossed over. I think that this podcast is going to be partly about discovering what we can learn from that struggle we all go through in our lives as we're trying to be purposeful. Jeff: The reality is it's not pretty. I think that we've all agreed that there's gonna be moments when we want to ask those questions that allow people to dance around that darker space and explain how they got... how they rose from it, and the tools that they used to be able to come out of it, and I think that's an important thing. You're right, the podcasts I listen to, I'm not sure if I hear that very frequently, and I wanna hear that, I wanna know that. I don't wanna get bogged down in the mire, but I wanna know what that mire looks like and how they got out of it, because to me, that's the true definition of transformation. Erik: And Jeff, you told me something I like. You said, "Growth is volcanic," and I love that. So get ready for some volcanic and explosive storytelling, full of grit, full of flailing, full of some blood, either physical or psychological-- Jeff: Metamorphic, if you will. Erik: --because that is what it's all about, No Barriers to everyone.

Richard Saul Wurman, founder of TED, discusses the one constant in the universe: change. 

“The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't understand something” ― Richard Saul Wurman   www.heatherchauvin.com 

For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we call the Internet and now AI. In her new book, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT, 2017), Carnegie Mellon associate professor Molly Wright Steenson, considers four of these designers: Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte, to examine how they included elements of interactivity in their projects. In so doing she illuminates how their work influences today’s technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we call the Internet and now AI. In her new book, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT, 2017), Carnegie Mellon associate professor Molly Wright Steenson, considers four of these designers: Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte, to examine how they included elements of interactivity in their projects. In so doing she illuminates how their work influences today’s technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we call the Internet and now AI. In her new book, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT, 2017), Carnegie Mellon associate professor Molly Wright Steenson, considers four of these designers: Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte, to examine how they included elements of interactivity in their projects. In so doing she illuminates how their work influences today’s technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we call the Internet and now AI. In her new book, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT, 2017), Carnegie Mellon associate professor Molly Wright Steenson, considers four of these designers: Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte, to examine how they included elements of interactivity in their projects. In so doing she illuminates how their work influences today’s technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we call the Internet and now AI. In her new book, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT, 2017), Carnegie Mellon associate professor Molly Wright Steenson, considers four of these designers: Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte, to examine how they included elements of interactivity in their projects. In so doing she illuminates how their work influences today’s technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Debbie talks to TED founder Richard Saul Wurman about learning and education.

  My guest today has built, not one, but eight 7-figure products and has been named one of the top internet marketers in the world. Yanik Silver is one of those guys that seems to manage to do more in a week than most people do in a lifetime. Among many of the projects he has launched he is most famous for creating the Maverick 1000 – a private, invitation-only global network of the top entrepreneurs and industry transformers. If I mention all the media Yanik has been featured in I won’t have any time left to interview him! His new revolutionary book called ‘Evolved Enterprise’ has received endorsements from some of the most iconic figures in business, including, Sir Richard Branson, Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS, Brian Smith – founder of UGGS and Richard Saul Wurman – creator of TED Talks among many others. He plans on Taking your business from transactional to Transformational and even transcending. It is with great pleasure and honor that I bring to you a man that is less interested in the fact that he is a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, Adventure Junkie, philanthropist, digital marketing guru, darn good doodler, and super connected influencer … as he is a game changer. And by game changer I mean changing the way business is played. In the words of Sir Richard Branson.. “Yanik shows entrepreneurs how re-writing the rules can create a better world”   What you will learn: How to become a Maverick Why culture really matters Why having a bigger ‘why’ will increase your bottom line How to take your business from transactional to transformational How you can get to meet Richard Branson on Necker Island … and MUCH MORE Interesting highlights: Yanik almost went into theater instead of internet marketing Yanik has launched 8 multi-million dollar products Yanik lost $400,000 on a bad investment Yanik’s #1 practical advice:  Having a bigger 'why' will increase your bottom line Tweet This Wanna pick Yanik’s brain?   Join my exclusive FB group now (https://www.facebook.com/groups/canipickyourbrain) ! Resources & Links: Maverik 1000 (http://maverick1000.com) Evolved Enterprise  (https://evolvedenterprise.com/) Yanik Silver website (http://yaniksilver.com/) Thank You for Listening! I would like to personally thank you for listening to my podcast.  If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with others. Just click on the social buttons below. Also, if you podcast on iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/can-i-pick-your-brain/id1076916148?mt=2) , you would be joining me on my mission to help as many people as I can become really successful. And finally if you haven’t already subscribed podcast on iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/can-i-pick-your-brain/id1076916148?mt=2) , so you can get automatic updates whenever another episode goes live!

On the first Twin Peaks Unwrapped 2.0 show, Bryon and Ben talk with Richard Saul Wurman about producing the Twin Peaks Access Guide. Joel Bocko discusses the Owl Ring. We also talk about the Fire in Fire Walk With Me, Twin Peaks cast, and more.  Richard Saul Wurman  Wurman.com https://www.nantucketproject.com/idea-films/rsw  JoelBocko @LostInTheMovies
 JourneyThrough Twin Peaks video essay: http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com YouTube: MovieMan028  Music by Silencio Visit official Silencio website at Delsilencio.net Both of their albums are available on iTunes, cdbaby, Amazon and more! “Sycamore Trees" lyrics by David Lynch, music by Angelo Badalamenti Twitter: @TwinPeaksUnwrap Facebook: www.facebook.com/TwinPeaksUnwrapped Email:TwinPeaksUnwrapped@gmail.com

Episode Summary Tom Scott emerged as an entrepreneur at a young age when he started selling provisions to people stuck at gas lines in Maryland. When Scott and his college pal, Tom First, tried mixing peach juice and water in a blender in 1989, they did not imagine their little experiment would result in the creation of a multi-million dollar company. Tom discusses his success with Nantucket Nectars and his latest project, The Nantucket Project. What Was Covered 04:05 - How did Tom come up with the idea for Nantucket Nectars? 07:15 - Tom attributes his success to naivety. 08:50 - When Tom first got called an entrepreneur, he thought that person was a jerk. 11:00 - What does Tom look for in a team? 13:25 - What did Tom decide to sell Nantucket Nectars? 18:10 - The odds of making your idea perfect the first time around are incredibly low. 18:25 - You can't skip time, commitment, and trial and error. 19:05 - So many people want to tell the story before they've even made it. 19:45 - Rarely is anything an overnight success. 20:15 - What is The Nantucket Project? 23:00 - What was it like to interview Richard Saul Wurman, the creator of TED? 25:40 - For Tom, it's more about learning than it is about knowing. 26:35 - Give yourself permission not to know everything all the time. 26:55 - Tom recommends two books.   Tweetables Make Your Product Something for Yourself So Your Passion Is Authentic. Energy gives you courage to try new things. Can't skip the trial and error time it takes to make something great. Pitch is a concise telling of new things.   Links Mentioned J Robinett Enterprises John Livesay Funding Strategist Nan Tucket Project Website Nantucket Project on Facebook Nantucket Project on Twitter Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson Creativity, Inc by Edwin Catmull Want the Transcription? Click Here to Download Crack The Funding Code! Register now for the free webinar Share The Show Did you enjoy the show? I'd love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review! Click this link Click on the 'Subscribe' button below the artwork Go to the 'Ratings and Reviews' section Click on 'Write a Review'

This is a special podcast is part of It's All Journalism's coverage of the 2015 Society of News Design's workshop in Washington, D.C. It's a recording of a conversation between TED conference founder Richard Saul Wurman and Kris Viesselman, a designer and founder of Electric Ivy. The conversation was presented as a keynote address on Friday, April 10.

Scott Douglas, III, is the Executive Director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, an interfaith organization in Birmingham, Alabama. GBM provides poverty relief, lobbies to reform Alabama's state constitution, and has recently been active in opposing self-deportation laws. My conversation with Scott is a powerful reminder that status quo ideas vary deeply based on location and that equality—or equity, as Scott prefers—remains just as cutting-edge of an idea today as it did fifty years ago. Like Roberta Francis, Henry Louis Taylor, and Carolyn Raffensperger, Scott takes us into the legal structures undergirding our society to find discriminatory systems that are felt more often than seen. History plays a major role in this episode and Scott offers a great account of how people perceive historical moments in the present and in retrospect. You'll hear strong connections with Chuck Collins and Mark Mykleby about wealth and security. Elsewhere, listen for a John Fife-style spiritual critique of the individualism prized by thinkers like Oliver Porter, Richard Saul Wurman, and David Miller.

Scott Douglas, III, is the Executive Director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, an interfaith organization in Birmingham, Alabama. GBM provides poverty relief, lobbies to reform Alabama's state constitution, and has recently been active in opposing self-deportation laws. My conversation with Scott is a powerful reminder that status quo ideas vary deeply based on location and that equality—or equity, as Scott prefers—remains just as cutting-edge of an idea today as it did fifty years ago. Like Roberta Francis, Henry Louis Taylor, and Carolyn Raffensperger, Scott takes us into the legal structures undergirding our society to find discriminatory systems that are felt more often than seen. History plays a major role in this episode and Scott offers a great account of how people perceive historical moments in the present and in retrospect. You'll hear strong connections with Chuck Collins and Mark Mykleby about wealth and security. Elsewhere, listen for a John Fife-style spiritual critique of the individualism prized by thinkers like Oliver Porter, Richard Saul Wurman, and David Miller.

Gary L. Francione is an animal rights activist, proponent of veganism, Professor of Law and Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers. Previously he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, worked as an attorney in New York, and clerked for Sandra Day O'Connor. He is the author of several books including Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement and, more recently, co-author of The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation. For all of the talk of biocentrism and anthropocentrism that dominated many of the early episodes of The Conversation, animals have not been a major theme within the project. Chris McKay, Robert Zubrin, and David Keith all discussed animals in passing, but for Gary they are central to a discussion of what he considers the biggest issue of our era: the tension between moral realism and moral relativism. Questions of nonviolence, commodification, and empathy pervade our conversation, but Gary pairs his abstract notions with a lot of concrete examples—this episode deals with the visceral immediacy of everyday life and doesn't threaten to float away in a philosophical balloon. I think you will like this episode, just as I think it will challenge you. In terms of connections, there are points where Gary could almost be responding directly to Richard Saul Wurman's moral relativism. Lawrence Torcello will be on your mind, not merely because I mention him in the introduction, but because Gary's conversation provokes questions of relativism, pluralism, and how we can work towards the broader good. On another note, we're adding a new co-host to The Conversation: Neil Prendergast will be joining the project this episode. Micah and I aren't going anywhere but, as Micah's work schedule gets busier, we wanted to bring another voice on board so we can resume our weekly schedule and have two hosts on deck. We're also excited because Neil brings a fresh sensibility and body of knowledge to our concluding discussions. This will be fun.

Gary L. Francione is an animal rights activist, proponent of veganism, Professor of Law and Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers. Previously he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, worked as an attorney in New York, and clerked for Sandra Day O’Connor. He is the author of several books including Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement and, more recently, co-author of The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation. For all of the talk of biocentrism and anthropocentrism that dominated many of the early episodes of The Conversation, animals have not been a major theme within the project. Chris McKay, Robert Zubrin, and David Keith all discussed animals in passing, but for Gary they are central to a discussion of what he considers the biggest issue of our era: the tension between moral realism and moral relativism. Questions of nonviolence, commodification, and empathy pervade our conversation, but Gary pairs his abstract notions with a lot of concrete examples—this episode deals with the visceral immediacy of everyday life and doesn't threaten to float away in a philosophical balloon. I think you will like this episode, just as I think it will challenge you. In terms of connections, there are points where Gary could almost be responding directly to Richard Saul Wurman's moral relativism. Lawrence Torcello will be on your mind, not merely because I mention him in the introduction, but because Gary's conversation provokes questions of relativism, pluralism, and how we can work towards the broader good. On another note, we're adding a new co-host to The Conversation: Neil Prendergast will be joining the project this episode. Micah and I aren't going anywhere but, as Micah's work schedule gets busier, we wanted to bring another voice on board so we can resume our weekly schedule and have two hosts on deck. We're also excited because Neil brings a fresh sensibility and body of knowledge to our concluding discussions. This will be fun.

Richard Saul Wurman is a designer, author of over 80 books, and founder of several conferences including TED, WWW, and EG. Presently, he is working on Prophesy2025, a conference about the near future.  Richard caught our attention because he is both an architect and connoisseur of conversation. Because of this, we spoke entirely about conversation itself: its forms, rituals, and value. We also spoke about broader conversation and the hypothesis underlying this project. This episode is very different from its predecessors. It does not contain a prescriptive vision of the future, definitions of the broader good, or an exploration of a new phenomenon. It also lacks explicit connections to other interviewees, though you will hear implicit connections and think about Lawrence Torcello more than once. Given these differences, you may wonder why Micah and I chose to include Richard's interview in a project about society-wide conversations and the future. We have two reasons. First, Richard has thought about the details of conversation more than most of us and he provides a useful lens to examine our interviewees and the roles that Micah and I play in The Conversation (apologies for going meta). Second, while broader conversations may exist, Richard has no interest in creating or guiding them. He seeks interesting days for himself and is, generally speaking, a relativist. We think relativism is an important idea to address. Relativism questions the very concept of good and critiques the efforts of every participant in this series, regardless of their agendas. It also challenges The Conversation as a project and presses us to explain why we cling to our naive belief that there is something greater than solipsism and our own pleasure. This is a good challenge. This is why we're posting Richard's conversation. 

Richard Saul Wurman is a designer, author of over 80 books, and founder of several conferences including TED, WWW, and EG. Presently, he is working on Prophesy2025, a conference about the near future.  Richard caught our attention because he is both an architect and connoisseur of conversation. Because of this, we spoke entirely about conversation itself: its forms, rituals, and value. We also spoke about broader conversation and the hypothesis underlying this project. This episode is very different from its predecessors. It does not contain a prescriptive vision of the future, definitions of the broader good, or an exploration of a new phenomenon. It also lacks explicit connections to other interviewees, though you will hear implicit connections and think about Lawrence Torcello more than once. Given these differences, you may wonder why Micah and I chose to include Richard's interview in a project about society-wide conversations and the future. We have two reasons. First, Richard has thought about the details of conversation more than most of us and he provides a useful lens to examine our interviewees and the roles that Micah and I play in The Conversation (apologies for going meta). Second, while broader conversations may exist, Richard has no interest in creating or guiding them. He seeks interesting days for himself and is, generally speaking, a relativist. We think relativism is an important idea to address. Relativism questions the very concept of good and critiques the efforts of every participant in this series, regardless of their agendas. It also challenges The Conversation as a project and presses us to explain why we cling to our naive belief that there is something greater than solipsism and our own pleasure. This is a good challenge. This is why we're posting Richard's conversation. 

All of us are being bombarded by so much information and data that we can barely keep up. If we want to be able to influence more effectively, we need to be able to do it concisely. Bonni and I discuss strategies for making this happen. Community Feedback USA: (949) 38-LEARN Global: +1 (949) 385-3276 Twitter: @DaveStachowiak #CFLshow feedback@coachingforleaders.com Mark Twain received the following telegram from a publisher: NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS. And famously replied... NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES. In his book Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman states that a standard issue of the New York Times contains more information than a citizen of 17th England would have absorbed in their entire lifetime. The problem? Many people will tune us out when we are not concise. People stop taking calls or are often "unavailable" from people who can't be concise. Lots of people will stop seeking advice from someone who can't give it concisely. We don't have credibility with most audiences if we can't communicate what we know concisely. What are the causes? For many of my clients, their technical training works against them in communicating concisely. People believe (falsely) that they are more credible the longer they speak. Not true...it's about quality, not quantity. The "PowerPoint culture" in many organizations has reinforced the myth that more information in slides is better when presentation information. Most of the time, it's not - less is more. Since making something concise takes time and investment, some of us simply just don't want to do it out of laziness...even when we know it would help the audience. Selfishness sometimes creeps in - we like to hear ourselves talk and we forget that our purpose is to add value for the audience, not to look good ourselves. What are the solutions? Ask yourself if what you are about the communicate is really essential to the overall message? If you put yourself in the audience's shows, would you really care about what it is you are about to say? Have someone you trust who knows your audience listen to what you are going to say before you get in front of your manager, a meeting, or a large presentation. Budget time to edit down what you are saying to make it more concise. Suggestions for implementation: Have firm standards on your conciseness and stick to them... As an example, this show is almost always 40 minutes or less. My weekly articles are 500 words or less Join Toastmasters and get practice speaking concisely Attend the Dale Carnegie Course and learn and use many models to get ideas across quickly. Community Feedback USA: (949) 38-LEARN Global: +1 (949) 385-3276 Twitter: @DaveStachowiak #CFLshow feedback@coachingforleaders.com One Coaching for Leaders article is showing up weekly in your inbox - stay connected with the show mid-week and keep getting ideas and tools that will keep you moving forward. If you're not already receiving the weekly articles, you can subscribe at this link. Thank you to Samuel Lewis, Jim Munchbach, Cliff Ravenscraft, Wade Wingler, and Brian Wallace for leaving written reviews on iTunes for the show. If this show has been valuable to you, please rate this show on iTunes to help others find it for the first time. Wherever you are in the world, whatever is on your agenda today, take one idea from this show to engage and develop someone you lead.

All of us are being bombarded by so much information and data that we can barely keep up. If we want to be able to influence more effectively, we need to be able to do it concisely. Bonni and I discuss strategies for making this happen. Community Feedback USA: (949) 38-LEARN Global: +1 (949) 385-3276 Twitter: @DaveStachowiak #CFLshow feedback@coachingforleaders.com Mark Twain received the following telegram from a publisher: NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS. And famously replied... NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES. In his book Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman states that a standard issue of the New York Times contains more information than a citizen of 17th England would have absorbed in their entire lifetime. The problem? Many people will tune us out when we are not concise. People stop taking calls or are often "unavailable" from people who can't be concise. Lots of people will stop seeking advice from someone who can't give it concisely. We don't have credibility with most audiences if we can't communicate what we know concisely. What are the causes? For many of my clients, their technical training works against them in communicating concisely. People believe (falsely) that they are more credible the longer they speak. Not true...it's about quality, not quantity. The "PowerPoint culture" in many organizations has reinforced the myth that more information in slides is better when presentation information. Most of the time, it's not - less is more. Since making something concise takes time and investment, some of us simply just don't want to do it out of laziness...even when we know it would help the audience. Selfishness sometimes creeps in - we like to hear ourselves talk and we forget that our purpose is to add value for the audience, not to look good ourselves. What are the solutions? Ask yourself if what you are about the communicate is really essential to the overall message? If you put yourself in the audience's shows, would you really care about what it is you are about to say? Have someone you trust who knows your audience listen to what you are going to say before you get in front of your manager, a meeting, or a large presentation. Budget time to edit down what you are saying to make it more concise. Suggestions for implementation: Have firm standards on your conciseness and stick to them... As an example, this show is almost always 40 minutes or less. My weekly articles are 500 words or less Join Toastmasters and get practice speaking concisely Attend the Dale Carnegie Course and learn and use many models to get ideas across quickly. Community Feedback USA: (949) 38-LEARN Global: +1 (949) 385-3276 Twitter: @DaveStachowiak #CFLshow feedback@coachingforleaders.com One Coaching for Leaders article is showing up weekly in your inbox - stay connected with the show mid-week and keep getting ideas and tools that will keep you moving forward. If you're not already receiving the weekly articles, you can subscribe at this link. Thank you to Samuel Lewis, Jim Munchbach, Cliff Ravenscraft, Wade Wingler, and Brian Wallace for leaving written reviews on iTunes for the show. If this show has been valuable to you, please rate this show on iTunes to help others find it for the first time. Wherever you are in the world, whatever is on your agenda today, take one idea from this show to engage and develop someone you lead.

With the publication of his first book in 1962 at the age of 26, RSW began the singular passion of his life: making information understandable. He chaired the International Design in Aspen in 1972, the first Federal Design Assembly in 1973, followed by the National AIA Convention in 1976, before creating and chairing TED (Technology/Entertainment/Design) conferences from 1984-2002. He created and chaired the TEDMED and eg2006 conferences. A B.Arch and M.Arch 1959 graduate with highest honors from the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Wurman’s nearly half-century of achievements includes the publication of his best-selling book Information Anxiety and his award winning ACCESS Travel Guides. Each of his 81 books focus on some subject or idea that he personally had difficulty understanding. His most recent publications include UNDERSTANDING USA, Urban Atlas, Wall Street Journal Access, Information Anxiety2, Diagnostic Tests for Men, Diagnostic Tests for Women, Heart Disease & Cardiovascular Health and Wills, Trusts & Estate Planning, UNDERSTANDING Children and UNDERSTANDING Healthcare (January 2004). He has been awarded several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Graham Fellowships, two Chandler Fellowships, and the Chrysler Design Award in 1996. In 1991, RSW received the Kevin Lynch Award from MIT and was honored by a retrospective exhibition of his work at the AXIS Design Gallery in Tokyo, Japan on the occasion of their 10th Anniversary. He received a Doctorate of Fine Arts by the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Art Center College of Design and an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Boston. Presently, RSW is working on his latest project 19.20.21. which he created and chairs with his four partners: Larry Keeley, Jon Kamen, Michael Hawley, and Robert Friedman.

The entirety of my March 2009 interview with the inventor of information architecture, Richard Saul Wurman - in iPod/iTunes chapterized format

Part 1 of my March 2009 interview with the inventor of information architecture, Richard Saul Wurman - in mp3 format

Part 2 of my March 2009 interview with the inventor of information architecture, Richard Saul Wurman - in mp3 format

Part 3 of my March 2009 interview with the inventor of information architecture, Richard Saul Wurman - in mp3 format

Part 4 of my March 2009 interview with the inventor of information architecture, Richard Saul Wurman - in mp3 format

The entirety of my March 2009 interview with the inventor of information architecture, Richard Saul Wurman - in mp3 format